Kiss My Fishy!!!

Deja Moi Comme Ca - The New Blog : )

2008-11-25T11:50:00.003+01:00

Hey guys : )!

Okay, today I think I'll make another Vlog for you guys... but will attempt being more comfortable with the camera ^_^.

I've decided to change my old blog, Kiss My Fishy, over to my new blog "
www.dejamoicc.wordpress.com ". I feel that it's more me and after spending a whole year and almost 5 months with the KMF theme, it's time to change over to a more neutral blog, since Kiss My Fishy isn't even really about fishing anymore! : P

I'm really excited about the new start! Of course I'm going to move all of the KMF posts over to this blog but it wont be able to be back dated, so I'll just put the official date at the top of the blog. I will only be updating the "Deja Moi Comme Ca" but Kiss My Fishy will always be up as it is now though : ).

On the 50th post, I also made my first "Vlog". I'll be making a new Youtube and re-loading the video again...

I really did enjoy having Kiss My Fishy and appreciate everyone who ever participated in the game! Thanks guys : ).

Hoping to hear from you soon!

- Bianca

My new e-mail address is; dejamoicc@gmail.com

My First Vlog For My 50th Blog!

2008-11-24T15:54:00.013+01:00

Hey Kiss My Fishy readers!

I have news again, yay! Well I’ve only just realised that I didn’t finished my last blog off correctly :-O!! The “Louvre” wasn’t our last stop off that night, we’d actually driven up to the “Sacre Coeur” afterwards!

The drive was up to the Sacre Coeur was up little cobbled roads, we found a parking right by it… It was brilliant. As we stepped out of the car and the freezing air hit us, all that I wanted to do was get straight back in and go back to the hotel to bed… Although we did just brave the cold and I would have absolutely regretted it if I hadn’t.

As we walked closer to the Sacre Coeur the view that came into vision was one of the most stunning things that I’ve ever seen… It was late at night so all of Paris’ lights were illuminated and against the coal black of the night it was just… breathtaking!

This is where the cold really hit me and I began shivering uncontrollably… That must of looking funny, it was a shiver every minute or so up my spine… So I decided to have a good look at the Sacre Coeur and then thought better than to stay in the cold, so after one more ogling moment at the city view, I accepted my dad’s jacket and headed back to the car to be warmly welcomed… by the warmth… of the car /:|!

I can’t believe that I left that out in my last post!

My second cousin Keenan came to stay with us for a week last Monday! We’re only just back from dropping him back off at the airport in Carcassonne. It was really great seeing him again… We baked a cake together! Keenan can crack eggs with one hand! I told him that I put that in my blog… randomly… and now I have! Even if it’s not that random since I’m on the subject of him… Aww, well.

This weekend Venetia and I took him to the ice-rink with us. On Sunday morning, after skating on Saturday, he was telling me about how much pain he was in… I laughed… Then I reminded myself that that was me once : P! This is an extract from the blog “Ice-skating!” that I wrote this time, last year “For three whole days I was in severe pain with my legs and arms. Guess I’m not used to doing so much exercise :-P. On the third day I thought it would be so much better but it was worse! I literally just flopped out of bed.”… I stopped laughing : P.

On Tuesday many… things happened… I can’t think of an appropriate adjective. You see, my dad slipped down the stairs leading to the basement but at the end of the stairway there happens to be a wall… So about fifteen minutes after my dad had come back up stairs, half an hour later, with an inflated head and a cut by his eyebrow, we were in the hospital. He wasn’t focusing and we didn’t know how long he’d been unconscious for since all that he’d managed to do was slip down the stairs and come back up… within the half an hour that he’d been down there. It was really worrying.

After a lot of questions, my dad was getting blood samples taken. I happened to be in the room. As I watched the needle piercing through his arm, I was thinking to myself “I can handle this! I could totally be a doctor!”… But as I watched the forth phial of blood being filled up, I began thinking WAY too much about blood and how much of it people lose when they’re hit by a car… or hurt in any other way… Suddenly the room just got extremely hot, I took of my jacket but oh, no, the stubborn temperature just HAD to keep on rising… It was NOT good.

After a minute or so I began to feel a little nauseous and little black dots started appearing in my vision. This is when I decided to tell my mom, seeing my milk-bottle white face, my mom and the doctor ushered me to a seat… I was too hot, so was walked to the exit, to the cold air outside, that I was longing for. Before getting there, however, VWOOF, I fainted…! I’ve never fainted before, so it was exciting… after the scary part : P.

I was caught before I hit the ground though and then was suddenly on the closest bed. When I opened my eyes there were like, six faces looking down at me. After making sure that I was fine, I was laughed at because I fainted after seeing the blood… How professional : P!

I was put on the bed upside down… If you know what I mean, the part that holds you up was where my legs were… So once all of the doctors had dispersed, one that had evidently missed everything, came over and asked me if I’d hurt my leg and pointed to the end of the bed… or rather, the top of the bed… I simply relied “Non, je vais bien!” (No, I’m fine!) and gave him a very enthusiastic thumbs up with a big smile. He smiled and walked off. I then glanced down at my feet to see what exactly he’d meant… I almost died!

Firstly, I hadn’t realised that I’d been put on the bed the wrong way… this is when I realised… Secondly… on my shoe! There was a piece of toilet paper, I was like “Oh nooo!”. Talk about embarrassing… Well see, I didn’t think it was that bad… I thought it was just a piece of the paper that they put down on the beds, that had ripped off and stuck to my shoe… so when my mom came back over to check on me after being in the room with my dad, I told her… she went to my foot and said… No Bianca… That’s toilet paper. Yes, this is when I was like “Oh nooo!”. Hee hee!

The worst bit is that when the doctors lifted me after I’d fainted itwas three that did it, I’m not that heavy by the way… Hee hee! One took me under the arms and one took me by my feet… and then another one also took me by my feet… My mom told me this anyway, I don’t remember being lifted… So they would’ve seen the toilet paper!! Yes… Worries from a teenage girl… -_-…

And now anyone who reads this will know too!! Ahhh! It’s just that it is “blog-about” material, so it’s difficult to stop myself from typing and use the backspace button… Therefore it shall stay and I shall regret it : P.

After ten minutes of lying down, a slight headache in my right temple and the most awesome lemon drink EVER, I was feeling great again and at a normal temperature too!

It took a lot longer for my dad to recover though. The doctors made him stay in, despite the fact that he didn’t want to : P, for two whole nights to make sure that everything was okay. It’s really nice to know though that the hospitals here do a thorough job at making you better : ). His eye still looks painful though but other than that my dad’s recovering really well from the fall, I’m happy ^_^.

Okay, I’m going to leave it at that and get back to my French… or playing my guitar… or singing : P! I should really do my French first though : P.

I was just about ready to shut down this document, copy and paste it into a new Kiss My Fishy post when I noticed that… 505 days, 52,000 words after I posted up my very first KMF post and we’ve finally come to be at the 50^th post! Congratulations Kiss My Fishy and thank you to all of the readers who have been following my online diary type thing that most people know as a blog!And as a surprise... I made a Vlog today for you guys : P!

I shall write again soon!

- Bianca ^_^

The Scottish/ French Wedding... In Paris!

2008-11-14T19:32:00.004+01:00

Hey Everyone!

I returned from my trip away on Wednesday after eight or so hours of being absolutely bored to death in the car… Paris was astoundingly gorgeous!

We began the long journey up to where we were going to be staying for the three nights on the chilly Sunday “morning” (This is put into inverted commas because the time we were up at is neither morning nor night!… Well…. Technically it IS morning… but not in my books! I’d rather stay up to get to THAT hour then sleep and be woken for some ungodly reason… And of course, this was the worst… What we thought to be nine hours of travelling up ahead…Who would want to drag themselves out of bed for that : P).

At 4 in the morning, I was gently awoken and given a glass of apple juice (Apple juice is more efficient at waking you up then a cup of coffee… And it‘s healthier… And tastes better! : P)… Soon to be followed by “Madeleines Coquilles” (They’re a type of French breakfast cake, that’s in the shape of a boat) in the darkness of my mom’s and dad’s room… Okay, so it wasn’t exactly an ordeal to be woken at four but nonetheless I was hardly going to be ECSTATIC : P.

We were all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed by five o’clock… and ready to fall back to sleep again in the car : P… Well, Venetia and I were anyway ^_^. It was a while later when I woke up again and from then on I just kept dozing in and out of consciousness : P… The car’s my favourite place to sleep ^_^… Venetia on the other hand has no option whatsoever… As soon as she knows that we’ll be in there for longer than half an hour, vwoop, she’s gone : P.

Venetia really just has a thing about sleeping… If you intend to wake her up at eight in the morning, you may as well just go ahead and poke/prod her at seven so that she can “finish her dream”… For some reason Venetia’s ALWAYS woken right in the middle of her dream and she must not be disturbed again until she’s finished… I, on the other hand, gladly jump up out of bed… realise this was a bad idea when I get dizzy and am forced to flop back onto the bed, lifting myself more slowly the next time… This is a daily routine for me : )… When will I learn -_-…

In case you haven’t noticed yet… I’ve changed the smiley faces! Yes, they don’t have the line noses anymore, now just the eyes and the expression-filled mouth! : ) They just look so much cuter… Aww!

I get distracted easily… : \

Once we arrived, our trusty “sat-nav”, brought us down to a cute little dead-end of a street… I was engrossed in my headphones so I didn’t notice the conversation in the background, however I did happen to notice that we’d driven down a little cul-de-sac (Haha! I just realised what this means literally in French… Cul (Backside) de (Of) sac (Bag)… Okay, it’s not actually funny… except for the backside bit… Heehee!) and the woman in the satellite navigator decided in her usual tone that “You have reached your destination!”. After switching her off, we drove around the round-about once more and then I don’t know what happened because I was listening to music… and got distracted… We somehow found our hotel! Yay!

No more having to listen to Gadget miaoing… for at least another three days! Yes, we brought Gizmo and Gadget with us. Gizmo is such a good little traveller, who just sleeps the whole way and doesn’t make any noise whatsoever… GADGET on the other hand… He’s just… so miao-ny! : P

I was all hyped up and ready to do something when we arrived but since my mom had been the one to have to drive eight hours straight was a little tired, so we just relaxed and hung out… for a while! My mom’s like a machine though! Coming from England to France, she drove seventeen hours… Without sleeping! Now that’s skill : P. So later on in the night we took a drive up to the Eiffel tower : P. I’ll get back to this later ^_^.

On Monday, we had a lovely lie in… And after a good three hours of having curlers in my hair, doing my make-up and already ruining one pair of my tights with a “ladder”… We were ready to hit the road! We left an hour early, not wanting to be late, since we didn’t know where the wedding was being held and couldn’t trust the sat-nav anymore. Thirty minutes later we arrived in the centre of “Milly-la-Forêt” and began driving around to find the wedding and a decent parking… It was easy enough… My mom saw a bunch of Scottish lads in kilts and so we knew the general direction : P.

Once we found our parking… Absolute disaster struck… Venetia noticed that the heel of her shoe had broken… And this being a bank holiday, no open shoe stores were in sight… We tried and failed to fix it and the bride was about to arrive, so Venetia just went! All was well, as we did get it repaired on the way to the party though.

It was the most gorgeous marriage ever! Virginie looked absolutely stunning in her wedding dress and Joe fitted the part perfectly in his kilt. There was even a bagpipe player!! It was a French/Scottish Wedding… In Paris (or close enough to Paris ^_^)… just in case you didn’t read my previous post… or if it’s not obvious : P.

At five o’clock in the evening, we set off to the next destination, which was about twenty minutes drive away, setting the sat-nav we were off… and got completely lost! We were taken to a lonely road… in the middle of nowhere, so we set back to the closest village, stopped in at an open pharmacy and were soon off again with directions, being ten minutes late finally we arrived at the “Manoire des roches”.

We parked a little way from the main building and walked the rest. Ushered into a large tent type thing, we were filled with the talkative environment and the warmth of the outside fire warmers… I “google-d” that to try find the correct word for them but the majority of the pictures were of kettles… So I hope you know what I mean… I don’t mean kettles : P!

It was brilliant seeing everyone again. Venetia tried an escargot for the first time in her life! You see the guy with the tray of little aperitifs walked past and offered us some, so of course we happily accepted… I played it safe and chose a ham and cheese looking thing…

Whilst Venetia picked out a pastry filled with - at that moment - unidentified green stuff… She took a small nibble into it, thinking that it was just spices or something… Realised that there was more to it and asked me whether or not I thought it was “escargo”, I replied “nah!“. Of course, believing that it did have a strangely close resemblance… Then the man beside us, peered over, looked at it and said in a very certain voice “Oui, oui. Escargo, escargo!”. Venetia smiled at him, looked at that fateful, bite-sized snack, that she had been oh, so afraid of trying before in her life… Brought it up to her lips… and ate it! Then she was on a quest to find more : P!

Yes, it was quite a night! After a few hours of mingling and pretending to be an airplane with a four year old called “Markus”, everyone started dispersing into the grand manor/ hotel. Venetia and I thought that what we were just at was the majority of the night… So we’d been nibbling on any snacks that where unfortunate enough to pass by our way…

We even found ourselves having a long conversation with Ciaron right by the place where they continuously placed new trays filled with yummy goodness… So when I overheard my mom saying “We better start making our way over to the tables then.” I felt the crumb-covered fried chicken catch in my throat… What?! There was MORE food… Uh oh! Seeing as it was my first wedding ever, you can’t blame me, SOMEONE should have said something : P!

Venetia and I made our way over and into the dining area, to find our mom already sitting down… I thought, cool, I must be seated beside her! I went over and looked at all of the name cards only to feel panic rising! My name wasn’t there! Nor was it on any of the tables near her… I saw a group of young adults/ teens further down the room. My heart leapt into my mouth! I’m a very shy person and as I came closer and closer, dreading what may lie ahead, I realised that they were all engrossed in deep conversation… FRENCH conversation! I walked around and there it was a neatly written “Bianca”… I glanced at the empty chair beside me and relief rushed over me as the name “Venetia” came into vision.

I shook the whole of the first meal, my hands just wouldn’t stay still! Later on though I felt incredibly silly for being so worried/shy. The night was fabulous and the meals were incredibly tasty! I didn’t converse much with the brother and sister to the left of me… I did try start a conversation but it sort of ended abruptly… So most of the dining was spent talking to the girl next to Venetia who spoke perfect English, Celine. I did speak a little bit of French with her though and just as I was ready to burst into a French frenzy all of the meals where finished and people were getting up and walking around… I regret not having spoken more but there is always plenty of times to speak French whilst living in France, I suppose : P.

Oh! Whilst we were in the middle of a lovely duck dish, Markus came over and decided that his stuffed-toy dog wanted to sleep under our table… He is so cute! So off he went and came back above about a minute later to say that his dog had to be woken up in two minutes… A few minutes later he ran off to the table his parents were at and came back with a miniature sized pillow and blanket and decided that he wanted to sleep under our table too, so off he went… It was incredibly cute, even if he did brush past Venetia’s and my leg’s and give us heart attacks…

There was a champagne fountain and the cake was the most incredible cake that I’ve ever seen! It was the Eiffel tower with the Loch Ness Monster underneath it! Absolutely amazing! And it tasted awesome too : P! Afterwards there was dancing… My dress could twirl so it was awesome… Even if I didn’t dance… much : P.

All in all, the night was the best ever! There was even games and a slideshow during dinner… It was great : )! The whole wedding and the party lasted eleven hours and we left before it ended! So at two A.M. we headed back to then hotel and were glad to be welcomed to our beds.

The next day we had to be up relatively early, to be ready for the brunch at 11:30. I wore heels and skinny jeans and rather regretted it when I got there because all of the little children were playing football and running around the forest… The ball came towards me and so I kicked it without thinking and really, really hurt my foot : P… But the pain went away after a few seconds, so all was well : )!

After eating, I went back outside and hung around with the four little people “building” a house on a large, mossy rock… This is where my French came in handy, I had long conversations with them, not being afraid of being wrong. I understood absolutely everything that they said and they understood me, so it was a really nice feeling : ).

I turned to Markus after conversing with a pretty, little French girl and spoke to him in English. She looked up at me wide eyed and asked if I spoke English, I was ecstatic! She hadn’t noticed that I was a foreigner other than when I spoke English!! Aww! I was so happy!

After a few hours of being at the place, we decided to say our goodbyes and leave. When I told the kids that I’d been hanging out with (Their ages varied from two to about five years old) that I had to go, the smallest one that hadn’t spoken very much to me and only in a very quiet voice, stood up and said “Où?” (Where?). I almost melted inside because it was just the cutest thing! When I replied that I was going to Paris he smiled and said very proudly “Moi, j’habite à Paris!” (Me, I live in Paris!). When we were ready to get into the car, his dad lifted him up to my height and I received a kiss on the cheek, aww!

With the sound of crunching gravel and dried out leaves being driven over, we drove off. Half an hour later we were invited into the large city that Paris is with all of it’s traffic.

It was gorgeous as ever. In every single direction you looked in there was at least one old building with it’s mass detail. Our first sight-seeing stop was the “Notre Dame Cathedral”. We spotted it and then had incredible difficulty getting parking close enough to it. A while later we stumbled into an underground parking and began our long walk toward the Notre Dame. When we arrived at our destination, it was absolutely stunning, in it’s entire glory, unbelievably gothic with all of the detailed yet expressionless faces of the 5,000 gargoyles looking down upon us (Which is 2,800 less than that of the organ pipes : P).

We walked around the whole of the cathedral, trying to take in all of the detail, that had once been worked so hard on by great artists to get. The very first construction of the hulking building started almost 900 years ago in 1163, incredible!

After spending a while gazing up, the dark began to set in as did the chill in our bones. So we set off across the road to buy some winter-gear. Whilst we were in the shop, we heard two girls speaking English, the one with a distinctive accent. Venetia asked her where she was from and sure enough it was South Africa. We told her that we were born in Zimbabwe, had a quick conversation and were off again.

We went into the Cathedral for a few minutes to see what it was like and then decided to head off to our next short-stop, the Eiffel tower. We had seen it the first night that we had arrived, the weather wasn’t too bad, so we decided to accept the chance to see it. It was so international, there was so many languages drifting about in the air, truly lovely : ).

After we came out of the Cathedral and began the walk back to the car, “PLONK!”… a raindrop fell on my head… and then on Venetia… And then my parents noticed them too… Suddenly it was pouring! We quickened up our pace and even ran for a while, whilst have extreme fits of laughter. Stopping under the shelter of a sticky-out bit in a building a street or so away, hoping that it would die down… Of course, it didn’t! We continued going, since we were all already drenched and then thinking that we were close to the underground parking lot… We realised that we were actually lost!

Finally we found our way to the right street, rain still falling heavily upon us and to the door to get in. By this stage my asthma had taken over and even though my legs were freezing with the ice-cold rain saturating my jeans the top half of me was unbelievably boiling. As soon as I got into the dry, warmth, I pulled off my jacket and whipped out my inhaler from my bag that had been lying peacefully in the car. After a few puffs, I was fine again and relieved of the comfort of the car.

We drove around to the Eiffel tower but decided not to get out, since all of our clothes were wet and the rain was still being persistent. Instead we took a slow drive past and even saw the twinkles for the second time. The first time was when we were pulling up on the road directly in front of it on the first night. It was like magic, perfectly timed magic!

Afterwards, we drove to the “Louvre” but thought it would be a waste not to get out and go see it, so we braved the cold. It was alright the rain had subsided just in time : ). The pyramid was absolutely brilliant and the Louvre was superb! My mom got some cool pictures there. Even after seeing everything the Eiffel tower is still my favourite, it was even lighted with a purple-blue glow. Stunning!

On Wednesday we got up at a reasonable hour and came back home. Despite all the fun that I had in Paris I missed my little town so, so much! Home sweet home : D.

The drive up to the house was just so exhilarating! The space! My place! The animals were more than happy to be back… I love home : ). I really missed my double bed and my stylish black mosquito net! And everything else ^_^.

Okay, I’m going to have to leave you all now. I’m being kicked off my OWN computer… Again! Sorry that this post was so long!

Catch you all soon! Looking forward to hearing from you, leave me comments ^_^.

- Bianca : ) (The CUTE smiley ^_^)

It’s sooo unbelievably awesome…

2008-11-03T13:43:00.009+01:00

Hey Kiss My Fishy Readers!

The reason for absence of Kiss My Fishy posts are again because of the computer-hogger, like I said in the last post. Today I’ve just so happened to get to MY computer before Venetia ^_^…

Also, I’ve actually been busy :-O! Therefore, I have A LOT to write about!

First of all, I went to Marseille last week for three days to stay with friends there. Sadly it was bitterly cold the full day that we had there, so I can’t say that I saw an immense amount of Marseille.

The drive in was slow though… Well, we didn’t have the option, we just happened to arrive at our destination (after being on the road for six hours) at seven o’clock at night. Which wouldn’t appear to be rush hour… Well trust me it wasn’t rush hour! Nobody was interested in rushing whatsoever, no one had the choice… Traffic! And tonnes of it!

I… It… just… not like my little town :-O! I’ve never seen such an endless queue! We were grateful though because it gave us the chance to have a good amount of time sitting still and taking in the scenery. The sun had finally rested and darkness had set in, so the hundreds of little lights were all aglow, sparkly ^_^!

It was great to see Wilf and Gui-Gui again, their new place is lovely :-). The last time I wrote about it was in “THE END OF THE WORLD”.

On the second day, we decided to brave the cold. My dad, my sister and I, once bundled up in warm winter-alls, took a walk through the streets of Marseille in search of a “boulangerie” (a bakery of course, why else would we go out into the cold?!) :-P.

It felt a lot like being in Sicily again, the bustling streets, the vegetable stalls and of course… The bakery! In all of it’s glory, stepping into the warmth with the sweet smell filling your senses. After choosing what we wanted, getting a cutely ribbon wrapped box with the entire sugar-y goodness’ cosy inside, we were ready to face the walk back. It was only about five minutes, five minutes that killed me! That was the steepest hill I’ve ever walked in all of my life. It was just necessary to eat the baked goods later to put the calories I’d burned back on ;-).

When I say it was cold, I don’t mean that it was below freezing temperature, I only mean that it was colder that I’m used to... Much colder than I’m used to in fact. TEN degrees!! Pffft, the thought of it! :-P

We left at lunch time the next morning and when we got back home, Gizmo and Gadget were unbelievably relieved! They had come with us, since we couldn’t find anyone to look after them whilst we were away, and they’ll do so again when we go to Paris for the wedding… I shall come to that later! Gadget was even hugging the walls :-P, Gizmo just flopped into his bed…

I met Saoirse! I’ve known Saoirse since the beginning of summer but I’ve never actually met her before. She’s been living in France since she was eight and is now almost sixteen, so speaks French fluently (as do her siblings Dearbhla and Briain and their parents Darren and Niamh).

It was a little bizarre but not awkward whatsoever meeting her, since we already knew each other… If you know what I mean… We went into Auchan together with my sister and this little guy, who actually looked French (He had the little moustache, goatee AND beret!!) walked past us and said “Bonjour Mademoiselles!”, instinctively we all replied with a polite “Bonjour!” and continued on… This story doesn’t actually relate to nor have any relevance with anything but it was just extremely French, so had the need to write about it!

We had an absolutely great time, thanks for coming guys ^_^.

Oh! What (I’m sure… well no, actually, I doubt it, but anyway…) you’ve all been waiting for! The Halloween Night at the ice-rink, last Saturday was the absolute BEST…

After hours of preparing then finally being ready, as we drove up to the entrance, I began to get butterflies… There were so many teenagers hanging around outside… and of course, none of them whatsoever in costume, I was about to take off my wings, when suddenly that little voice - that I hear constantly in my head - reminded me of when I’m thirty I HAVE to have something crazy to talk about!... Even if it’s not crazy whatsoever, dressing up on the Halloween night…

And so I got out of the car and straightened my wings… Venetia, being no help whatsoever, with her not wearing her damn bunny ears and instead carrying them in a bag… No infact! Venetia made ME carry them in the bag!!!

Anyhow, my outfit was a huge hit, even if most people thought I was a butterfly… or a bat… One woman asked me what I was, I replied “Une fee sombre” (a dark fairy), “Ahh, pourquoi “sombre”?” (ahh, why dark?)… Of course my quickly thought out response was the best I could do with and once again that “Pourquoi ne pas?” came in handy saying “It’s Halloween, why not?” :-P.

I didn’t mind being in my fairy outfit, actually I really enjoyed it, once I was inside the rink… The first few people I saw were under nine year olds in witches and devils costumes, so indeed I did feel like slapping myself across the face with my wings since there was absolutely no one my age dressed up…

Then! The coolest people EVER entered through the door! Jedi’s with lightsabers and demons with blood stained shirts and… and… other scary things! Wooo! The night was brilliant, even if my wings did keep flapping about whilst I was ice-skating.

Sadly though I didn’t get any photo’s taken which is incredibly weird for me :-P. Guess it was almost Halloween :-P, creepy things happen!

I did however get many, many pictures taken of me on the real Halloween night, I didn’t go anywhere, (not that there was anywhere to go for me :-P) expecting the smaller children from around the neighbourhood to be “ding-donging” on all of the doors… I got all dressed up as a fairy, the only difference from the ice-rink Halloween night being my make-up and that I curled my hair and my purple hair streak on the Saturday, but rather on Halloween, just got my mom to do my hair BIG for me ^_^.

(There's THE socks :-P!)(Pictures courtesy of my mom's awesome photography skills. Thank you ^_^!)

And so I waited… And I waited… And I waited some more… Until finally I realised that nobody would be coming, and gave in… Darn pumpkin heads, mini-devils and other ghostly, ghoulish things!!

So we had no one trick or treating at our house but my mom and I did see them coming back from shopping, so it was okay… Even if my outfit was WASTED!

I went ice-skating on Saturday and I thoroughly enjoyed it! Finally after almost one whole year of going ice-skating I’ve learnt how to do a… DUN DUN DUNNNN… 180 degree turn!!! But not only the turn…oh no, an awesome start off to it! It’s sooo unbelievably awesome… Even if sometimes I do happen to forget to lift my foot that little bit more and instead of continuing magically backwards instead of forwards… I begin to uncontrollably spin in circles or just immediately come to a stop… Luckily, most of the time standing up, but sometimes sitting on my backside on the freezing cold ice… Oh what fun!

Yesterday however… We arrived at the ice-rink in the pouring rain (of course we were in the car, but that's besides the point)… only to find out that the hours I spent on waiting for my hair to curl had been WASTED!! There were signs all on the windows of the entrances clearly starting that the ice-rink was in fact closed today... And all because of "technical issues"... Damn it... I really wanted to get my 180 degree turn just perrrfect >.<... Aww well.

Reluctantly we went home and I spent the rest of my day watching the Disney Channel in English and then doing an hour and a half of the Pimsleur French language course... I know! I'm such an exciting person :-P.

You see, I've been doing Pimsleur since Thursday. In total there's 90 lessons, which is a whopping 45 hours... I've done 23 lessons, so far... Hoping to get at least 7 more done today and 40 more this week after that, before I go to the wedding in Paris. It's strangely addictive... Even after doing hour after hour of it, there's a need for more. It's just easy listening and now when I while away half an hour doing something that is not constructive, I'm annoyed that it wasn't a lesson of the French... Addicted much? :-P

So yes, next Monday we shall be attending a Scottish/ French wedding in Paris. I'm unbelievably excited! It will be my first ever wedding and since it's Scottish I'm going to be wearing a gorgeous red tartan rockabilly style dress. Eeeek! I can't wait ^_^. I will write more about it next week once I'm back from Paris.

A few days ago I was reading through my blog, it's incredible to see how much can happen during one year... This time last year the ice-rink wasn't even anything in my life... I didn't even know where the place was! Nor had I any friends whatsoever here... Talk about sad :-P. Now the ice-rink is a major social place for me, that is necassary to go to at least once a week or else I don't go out at all. I know all of the "usual"s there and I DID know all of the staff until they moved on and new people took their places >.<.

This is an extract of a post that I put up last Halloween (October 31st 2007) titled "Hmm...": FRANCE! Well as you all know I have absolutely no friends what so ever in France… STILL! Depressing, eh?

There it is, the sad proof :-P... I love living in France now ^_^.

Saturday the 10th of November 2007 was the very first time that I ever set foot in the ice-rink... I found this out in the blog "Ice-skating!"... WOuld you ever have guessed :-P.

And still I cannot skate backwards more than three steps... well rather glides... Because this is when I'm forced to look over my shoulder incase of the "crashing-into-people-who-can't-see-that-the-crazy-Irish-girl-who's-only-just-learning-how-to-skate-after-a-whole-year-of-being-at-the-ice-rink-isn't-watching-where-she's-going" accidents. These can be one of the most fatal types of accidents... Honestly :-P! Once I look over my shoulder I get overwhelmed with the fact that I'm skating backwards and it simply is not right, so I try to lean forwards resulting in me getting a bit wobbly... And completely stopping going anywhere... And so the ordeal begins again!

When I let Gizmo outside this morning, I was extremely surprised at the weather... The sky is a flawless blue, the sun is shining brightly and the birds are all pleased to feel the warm and so show it in their songs... Perfect!

And I should really be out there soaking in the atmosphere... Whilst doing PIMSLEUR.... Mwahahahahaha!!! Ehem... Yes, so I shall leave you all now. Hoping to hear from you soon!

- Bianca

Most of it's talking about Halloween though, my purple and black socks...

2008-10-20T12:39:00.007+02:00

Hey guys!

I know it's been a while since I last wrote and I have been meaning to but a certain someone always seems to be hogging MY computer... therefore it's been a little bit difficult to get on.

Surprisingly, I actually have got a lot to write about but have absolutely no idea where to begin...

Well, the only thing that I simply can't get out of my head, which is making time pass much more slowly than it usually does, - What?! :-O 12:52?! I really have to stop glancing down at that clock -_-... - Soiree Halloween! Well just Halloween in general, anytime and everytime that I have the chance to wear my...

This is where my mouse froze and my computer crashed. Since I hadn't saved I'd had to write down all of that onto paper - oh, how primitive ;-) - before switching my computer off... Only to restart it where it began to SQUEAL at me! Not good...

I had to restart it a good few times but it continued to crash, so now using my mom's laptop in the comfort of my bedroom. If you were on Kiss My Fishy earlier today, you would have seen that I had to quickly paste my poem onto Kiss My Fishy to save it onto something more permanent than my computer's hardrive :-P...

So yes as I was saying before I got oh so rudely interuppted and lost half an hour of MY LIFE... Anytime and everytime that I have the chance to wear my... FAIRY WINGS! I'm getting back in touch with my five year old self... Okay, okay... I'm constantly going about like a five year old but this time I ACTUALLY have an excuse... Yay!

It's not as though they are the little, pink, fluffy wings... Oh no! I'm going to be "Une Fee Sombre", a dark fairy!! MWA HA HA HA HA! A couple of weeks ago my sister and I took a trip to the dress up shop in my little town, after looking around e-bay a lot and just not finding exactly what I was looking for... There, in the shop window was the little, pink, fluffy wings -_-... So instead I went inside - Now that takes brains! - and asked her if she had them in BLACK!! She replied no... Then something clicked and the lady said "Ahh, oui, oui!". Going to the other side of the shop and pulling out the most magnificent pair of black AND purple ones, saying that they were the last. I quickly accepted, even though I'm sure there'll be a whole group of six year old girls wearing the same pair but you know what... I don't care! That's how cool I really am!... Uhh huh... I can't even fool myself :-P.

Me when I was six years old, dressed up as a fairy... In the little, fluffy, white wings -_-... At least they weren't pink :-P. Holding Tiger Two, he's my favourite stuffed animal whom I'd had since I was 3 years old. He seems to be disguised as a red indian :-P.

I even got matching knee socks! Eee! You see I've never really got really dressed up for halloween... Except for that one time... and the other two... Heehee... Okay, well you see... The truth is... I'm starting to feel old, I know I'm probably too old to do it this year... But I don't mind. It'll be one of those CRAZY things I'll think of that I did when I'm like 30... I have no others, so why not... Yes... Why not?... This phrase in French, I've been repeating an awful lot lately... See everytime I tell someone that I'm going to be a dark fairy for halloween, they seem extremely shocked and reply "Tu est folle!" (You're crazy!)... So of course the only response I'm actually capable of saying is "Pourquoi ne pas?!".

My BIG night isn't going to be the 31st, nope, I'm not going to go as far as trick-or-treating :-P. Instead I'm going to go to the "Soiree Halloween" at the ice-rink this Saturday. I didn't know if I would be allowed to go and then my dad said yes ^_^!! I really can't wait! Mainly because I know nobody else will be going as something... It doesn't make a lot of sense, I know... And yet, I'm counting down the days... Or rather, trying not to, so that it'll go faster :-P.

On Saturday I recieved my PURPLE hair extension in the post... Really excited now.... Eeeeek! Okay I shall stop going on about it -_-... but lastly... Eeeee! The night that I got my wings my mom took a few photos, the clothes aren't what I'm going to be wearing with the wings but the socks are! Heehee... Okay! Shushing now.

This is the new DARK fairy! This was also the first time that I used hair curlers in an extremely long, long time :-P. I'll be getting my mom to take some pictures on the night so you can see what I actually wore though :-). This was just more or less for the wings and the socks... and the shoes :-P... But afterwards I found that I could actually wear the socks over my knee! Zut -_-.

As most of you should know it's autumn now, the winds are picking up and the leaves are leaving the trees (Heehee)... And all of them seem to be tumbling down into our garden! My dad raked them all up yesterday though and so my mom and my dad burnt most of them... Of course, when they went outside this morning... It appears that the magic of Halloween's kicked in and all of the leaves have revived themselves and taken back to cluttering up the grass.

I don't mind, I love the crunch they make and it's hilarious when Gizmo goes sniffing around and comes back with a face full, of course my parents aren't so keen. I don't see why nature just can't be nature... But all of our neighbours are ALWAYS preening their garden, so I suppose it's only right...

I feel very talkative this afternoon, I think it's because I'm just so excited and finally I can tell someone... Well rather, a lot of people in my mother tongue about halloween, yay, thanks for reading guys :-). OH and my socks have SKULLS on the back at the top... Awesome!... Of course they won't be seen as I'll be wearing skinny jeans but it still means a lot to me... Woo!

Oh! One of the nicest French conversation experiences happened to me a couple of weeks ago that I really just had to tell you guys! Venetia and I had just arrived at the ice-rink but we wanted to change a ten euro note into coins for the vending machines incase we got thirsty... or cold... or just snackish! Since the queue was long at the reception area, I ran upstairs to the bar and asked "Pouvez-vous changer ca pour cinq deux euros, sil vous plait?" (Can you change this for five two euros, please?).

I was absolutely shocked at the response, I wasn't asked to repeat myself or even just given a confused look, instead he took my tenner, started fiddling in the till, looked up and asked me what my ACCENT was! My ACCENT!! Not where I'm from, usually meaning they immediatey know I'm a foreigner... but what my accent is!! I was so overwhelmed, extremely ecstatic. I simply replied "Irlandaise". He seemed shocked, repeated my response in thought, handed me over a five euro note and the rest in change. I smiled thanked him and was back downstairs... Even though he hadn't changed the fiver it didn't bother me... Hoping that he had actually understood me but had rather been daydreaming. It was a really great feeling being asked my ACCENT!! Heehee...

I can't believe that it's OCTOBER!! The weather is absolutely incredible outside! I just can't get out that this is OCTOBER!! Summer did come late but that's not the point! I'm not appreciating it as much as I should be since I STILL have failed to open my French shutters today. I will get up and do that now.

Last week my uncle was here! He came all the way from Ireland, it was brilliant. My aunt was supposed to be coming with but couldn't make it. We were all really upset, we miss you Twanette!! Whilst Brendan was here though we went to the beach in Beziers again. It was brilliant! I wore three-quarter length jeans thinking that it would be cold since this IS October... I was absolutely incorrect of course! The day was gorgeous, the sun shine brightly and the wind was only then slightest cool breeze. Since I hadn't thought It would be good enough weather to go swimming in the ocean, I hadn't worn my bikini... Instead half way through being there I couldn't take it anymore and so just ran in, in my jeans. Of course, me being the "always-prepared-for-anything" sort of person (I carry plasters in my bag and always have at least one tissue in my pocket), I had a spare change of jeans so was all nice and dry for the drive back... Pffft, my mom would never have let me get back in the BMW if I'd been dripping :-P.

Anywho... After running in... I realised that the other people would think I'd wet myself when I came out of the water with my wet jeans on or just REALLY needed to pee and had ran in, in the attempt of eliminating the walk to the public toilets on the other side of the beach. And then the sand stuck to me... I didn't regret it though!

Venetia and I just made a quick walk to the swings and sat on them until the natrually light colour of my jeans had come back to life... when I got off the swingset... the sand from the rope seat had stuck to my backside and so I spent the rest of the day trying to keep it on the ground or the opposite direction from passers-by... It was oh so much fun :-P.

On the day that Brendan was leaving we took him to Carcassonne castle and walked around for a bit. It truely is gorgeous, a must-see. Then the crepes! We got to watch them being made and they were as good as they are in amsterdam!... I just love crepes ^_^.

I'm cold from drinking frozen apple juice now and rather hungry after talking about the crepes -_-. So I'm going to leave you with a new poem that I wrote! Hope you guys like it :-).

************************************************
Another hour,
Has been devoured,
By the greed of time,
The sun begins to cower,
And wilting are the flowers,
It is coming seven fifty-nine,
The clock sings its constant song,
Simply continues to move along,
The hands have no other option,
Suddenly I see you,
My feet are stuck, like glue,
Even against time’s efforts, there is an intermission,
The constant ticking fades,
As you meet my gaze,
The moving minutes freeze,
There is even a silence in the breeze,
My heart falters,
I close my eyes and gasp for breathe,
But when I blink, you’ve already left,
The tick-tock,
Quickly restarts,
I try to find your trail,
My world comes crashing down,
As does the hail,
I look for a dry place,
As I watch each passing face,
You’ve disappeared amongst the many, an ocean of fish,
Now I can only wish, of seeing you again one day,
Love at first sight – What more can I say?

- Bianca Cassandra P.
************************************************

Venetia just asked me what I was doing, I said Kiss My Fishy... She glanced at the screen, I scrolled up and showed her... Her response was "Woah!"... I replied as "Yeah... Most of it's talking about Halloween though, my purple and black socks...". Sorry for my randomness... I'm going to head off now to do some "Pimsleur" the French language course. "Catch" you all soon!

I don't believe in subliminal messaging...

So instead... I'll just be straight forward... Leave me comments!!! Comments!!!

- Bianca :-)

This one is about a special someone...

2008-09-29T12:31:00.007+02:00

Hey guys!

I’m sure that you’ll have noticed but shall just make it more in your face anyway… Ta-dah! I used my, oh so superb, Photoshop CS3 skills and made my banner more personal ^_^.

I think I’ll have to go kiss more fish soon because… Well… I got my hair cut! Therefore it’s necessary :-P. It was so scary, I spent a good three… okay I lie, four, hours surfing the web for the best possible hairstyle for me the day before. I only realised how much time I’d spent looking at all the pictures… after I’d passed the four hours doing it. Oh well! Well worth it…

Even if I did choose the one that I’d chosen in the very beginning -_-.

The French hairdressers are incredible, I got there at half past three in the afternoon, without making a “rendezvous” a little bit of waiting and I was getting my hair… vacuumed… They don’t seem to use towels, it makes more sense to use a vacuum anyway I guess. I was extremely worried though because when she was rinsing my hair she was splashing the water all down my shirt and I was thinking “Oh please, please let her be better at styling hair -_-”.

Before I continue, I apologise for the dudes out there that happen to be reading this. If you’re anything like my dad, I can only imagine how much hair interests you… Therefore I permit you to skip this section… Unless you want to “hair” (Okay… I don’t really pronounce “hair” as I would “hear”… so… lame pun -_-) what happened of course!

As the hairdresser pulled a long strip of hair down, between the scissors’ two blades, far too close (and short : P) for comfort, I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and heard that fateful “SNIP”. As I opened my eyes, she’s let go of the hair and it had fallen to the shiny floor below. She’d changed over to the razor scissors and started holding pieces of my hair taunt and just pulling down with the blade, my hair was so short!! At the end of all of the tugging and pulling… and drying… and hair spraying and… waxing… My hair was finally finished and perfect! I love it so much ^_^.

Even when I wake up it looks awesome : P. Okay, I shall stop going on about my hair now… But after I’d had my hair cut, I had to wait a while whilst my mom had hers trimmed. As I sat down there were two ladies already perched upon the other seats. They were so sweet, saying “C’est tres bien!” (It’s very nice!) and “Super jolies!!” (Super pretty!)… Aww! I had a conversation with the one for a while about how long I’d been living in France and how long I’ll be here for. It’s so nice to be able to speak and – slightly - understand French with the locals : ). I feel French!

On Saturday, we decided to get up early and head off for the beach in “Beziers”. At twelve-ish we arrived and it was absolutely gorgeous! The weather was wonderful – I kept repeating “I can’t believe it’s almost OCTOBER!!” – I was extremely amazed… The sky was flawless blue and everything was so open. Sitting on the beach staring out at the endless ocean and then looking up to the tall sky, whatever the absolute opposite of claustrophobic is… that’s what that feeling’s like! The sand was so soft, and pebble-less and there wasn’t any litter to be seen whatsoever. There were very few “early” risers about as well, so it felt like it was… Damn… I can only think of the French word… ours! Not exactly the word I was going for but it’ll do : P.

After two hours or so of making a sandcastle – with it’s very own mote and bridge – and gazing dreamily at the silent waves my stomach started to grumble, so we went off to find a nice park to have lunch at (I’m not one for sandy sandwiches! : P).

A little while later we came to the most gorgeous, grassy, recreational area. The was even a section with a lake and ducks and geese! As we were walking on the little stone paths we spotted an orange marbled Bengal cat. He was absolutely gorgeous, when we were leaving we saw him catch a frog, pick it up in his mouth (Eww!) run to the other side of the grass and played with it. Once we’d eaten and were back outside the gates and a few paces from the car, I spotted that there were little plastic bowls with cat food and the bottom of water bottles filled with water that had been placed by the fencing of the park for the cats! A little distance from the gates was another Bengal, he was white and grey striped with blue eyes, absolutely stunning, not as pretty as gadget though… of course : P!

We got back to the beach with a good couple of hours left to suntan before we had to head back for the two hour drive home. By this time, the jet-ski guys that had been practising before had really gotten into the flow of things and had started their racing for the championships. There were also A LOT more people who had gathered to watch, even so, there was still a whole lot of golden beach to find our own little space on.

Eventually we reluctantly left, knowing that Gizmo and Gadget were awaiting us at home for their dinner. It was an awesome day, so we’re doing it this Saturday again because my dad has a visitor coming over for a few days. I’m really looking forward to it!

I wrote two poems for you guys! I wouldn’t say that they’re particularly good but you can give me your verdicts! This one is about a special someone… THE Dean Dime Explosion Razorback Electric Guitar!!
************************************************
It’s worse than eating a lemon, when I see you,
That’s how much you make me drool,
Your style’s just way too cool,
You make me laugh,
The first time I saw you,
It was hard not to gasp,
Every time since then
My heart skips a beat,
I have to calm down,
Because it’s going “trop vite”*,
I want to uncover everything you have to give,
I want to learn every single riff,
You’re the perfect model,
I always stop by just to ogle,
I dream of the day when I can hold you,
It would be just us, “the musical two”,
One day I’ll feel those perfect spiked curves,
I truly believe I am in “lurve”**…
And even if I put you down, for the seldom second,
Soon enough, you know, that you’ll be re-beckoned,
You’d suit any scene, my darling “Dean”,
Even in the snow,
You’d still light up with your gorgeous glow,
One day I’ll have you and I’ll never let you go,
You are the one I want the most!

By Bianca Cassandra P.

* Trop Vite (Pronunciation – T-RO VEET) – French for too fast… but fast doesn’t rhyme with “beat”… Therefore I put it in French… and French is a love language, so it all works!

** Lurve – I believe it’s teenage slang for the word “love”, like the word “Rawk”… apparently this means “Rock”… I reckon it’s just the misspelling of the word to make it sound more hardcore but I’m not exactly a normal teenager so I’m not 100% sure...
************************************************
Woah! I was just on the Dean Electric Guitar site and I’m also now in love with the “Razorback Slime Bumblebee” as well… The name’s sort of gross : P but it’s so… stunning! Here’s the Dean Guitar’s site --> www.deanguitars.com/
I’m hoping I won’t get in trouble for taking the pictures off their site and putting them on here : P.

One more poem for you guys, about how long time takes to pass… and how very frustrating it is : P.
************************************************
Tick, tock,
Watching the clock,
Time passes more slowly,
I thought the one had already gone,
Now it’s tormenting me!
Wandering around,
Making mumbling sounds,
The hour hand seems to be dawdling,
If you survey,
It will delay,
So I have to stop ogling!
But why won’t the day,
Just pass away,
And bring on tomorrow,
Sorry this time,
My rhyme,
Doesn’t seem to have a moral!

By Bianca Cassandra P.
************************************************

I was surfing the internet a little while ago and found these two awesome shots! These birds can fish better than me : P! Woah.And finally:
My awesome Ibanez, which I drew… It doesn’t have strings because if I draw them on it’ll ruin the picture because I didn’t draw it to exact match… So the strings won’t… exactly match up correctly 0_o.
Okay guys! I’m starting to get peckish and the bread lady has been so I’m going to go eat! : P

Hoping to hear from you guys soon!

- Bianca

So, ha! I win… even if I don’t… But I sort of do... So, ha :-P!

2008-09-22T10:43:00.009+02:00

Hey guys!

Yay! I just checked my “Adsense”! Someone listened to me, I made 14 cents, thank you ^_^. Very exciting, the only time I’ve ever actually made any… sense... is… never. Haha! Sorry… never mind. The only time I’ve ever made cents was when I asked my grandmother to click on the links :-/… But shhh ;-)!

I went fishing!! Last week there was a day when the weather wasn’t too warm, so I asked my dad if he’d take me fishing. It was brilliant! We found a nice spot a few minutes… Okay, well, on the way home my dad and I placed bets on how many minutes it would take to get back. My dad guessed three, I guessed five. I set the counter on my mobile as the engine roared into play.

Three and a half minutes later we were driving up to the garage, I sat for a few seconds, then reluctantly got out, went to the garage… But, what’s this :-O! It was LOCKED! I had to go back to the car, 4 minutes, get the keys, slowly… but surely put the keys in, turn the lock, pull up the door, and slide it into place, as the car rolled in, the timer hit five minutes… So, ha! I win… even if I don’t… But I sort of do... So, ha :-P! Heehee. Yes, so the spot was about three – ehem, five - minutes away from home.

After about an hour of placing bright, orange blobs of cheese smelling bait onto my hook, casting out, waiting, getting impatient, reeling in, casting out again and so on until the bait flew off or sank to the bottom of the river and I had to start the whole procedure again the fish started tormenting us by jumping about just inches - INCHES I tell you!!! - from my float… Grrr! The wind wasn’t on my side either… it was coming from the other side of the river and blowing my float and whatnot back into the bank!

Finally though my float went under and the exhilaration was just too much to handle! I tugged to the right and quickly reeled in, to find my hook was cleaned off from any bright orange bait ever put on… and missing an extremely important component… The fish! After a few hours of being at the riverside, after catching no fish, we finally called it a day and went home. It was so much fun though!

During fishing I had a heart attack! Out of the corner of my eye I noticed this thing that was suddenly running towards me, I jumped out of my skin, only then to realise that it was just a giant, white, fluff ball of a dog. Soon to follow him, was his amused owner… It was not funny -_- :-P.

Gizmo just barked twice to be let into the lounge because I had the doorclosed, he ran in at full speed, did a few circuits around the room like a maniac, when he came back to my feet, I picked him up, cuddled him, put him back down… and then he went back to running circuits… he’s insane -_-.

Any who, as many of you may know, I had been mourning over the fact that the ice-rink has been closed for quite some time now - four months in total! On Wednesday though… as I said before, it was going to open, and it did! It was so much fun, there were actually more people there than I had expected as well, so even though I wanted to practise how to turn and continue going backwards without embarrassing myself too much… it was still great! Saturday and Sunday were awesome too ^_^. My legs aren’t as painful as I thought they’d be, since I did absolutely no exercise whatsoever during summer, except for the occasional swimming… I can’t believe I just admitted that -_-.

I’m ever so tempted to use the backspace button but shan’t, just because I’m THAT cool :-P.

If you’re thinking about moving to France but you’re petrified of the thought of having to learn another language, don’t be! I was so afraid that everyone would just be expecting me to speak French after a year of living in my little town but they weren’t! I even have a close group of friends now and even though half the time I can’t understand what they’re saying, I don’t mind because I can just say random things like “Il y a un dingue dans ton apart” – “There’s a nutcase/ looney in your apartment”… It’s funny to see them confused once in a while ^_^.

Learning another language changes the way you think about your own language, now every time, where a “that” (“que”) is implied in an English sentence… I just HAVE to put it in. Sometimes, I’ll get really creeped out because I’ll only be able to think of the French word for vaiselles… kitchenware/dishes -_-. Well that was just a random one but it just happens like that! Freaky stuff! Speaking of freaky stuff, woo, Halloween, can’t wait! That is all.

I don’t really have much news except that… I’m in love! He’s so gorgeous and… fiery /:|! Okay, so I’m in love with a guitar… Not just any guitar a DEAN guitar… *Drools*. I just read over that sentence and realised that I say “guitar” an awful lot… Guitar, guitar, guitar! Sorry, it was necessary for me to do that -_-. It’s a “Dean Dime Explosion Razorback Electric Guitar”, it’s all explosively and… and razor-y! Yes, my use of the English language IS just brilliant :-P.

Ahhhhh! Gadget has the power to give me heart attacks! From where I’m sitting I just barely saw him climbing onto the mantel piece, so I hissed and ran over, as I got there he was just climbing over my mom’s round glass thing that has a unicorn laser-ed into it. I put my hand up to stop it from falling and put my hand on the other two things my mom loves and then blew a raspberry at Gadget… Not exactly magic or super heroism but it did the trick anyway!

The doorbell just rang so I’m going to have to leave you all… Even if Venetia’s answering it and by the time I finish writing this, the postman would have given up and moved on. Every time the doorbell rings it makes me giggle, it’s in need of a battery so it sounds like… usually I’d come up with a pained animal noise, but it doesn’t sound like a pained animal… Therefore, I shall leave it as “Durrrng Duuuuung Deee Dooo”… Yep, that’s it ^_^.

I shall write again as soon as I have news, hoping to hear from you guys!

- Bianca

P.S. I'm so sorry about the sudden change of the writing font. I'm having a little bit of trouble keeping it on the one font. Grrr!

THE END OF THE WORLD

2008-09-12T16:06:00.001+02:00

Bonjour tout le monde!
(Good day everyone!)

Since when did we stop using phrases like "Good day"? Even the French don't use "bonjour" with their friends instead using "Salut" (Hi) or "Coucou" literally "Cockledoodledoo"… it's not insulting you saying that you're a chicken… or that they're a chicken it's just also used as "Hey" .

The difference though is that with every neighbour that you pass on your daily walk… okay, not so daily walk :-P, you do get a "Bonjour" from them… then again… half the time, as long as it's after 16:00 you will get the opposite of what you say if you say it first!... No, I don't mean "Malnuit" (Bad night… I don't actually think this is a French word but anyway…), heehee! I'm funny in two languages :-D. This is usually the way it goes;

EXT. Quiet French suburb
It's about 16:00, the sky is as blue as the Mediterranean ocean, there is a humble golden glow about the scene, leaves on the trees are blowing softly. A girl in the distance is walking two animals, one a dog the other a cat… She seems to be having difficulty not letting the cat climb a tree. It's the perfect day in France (Emphasise on the DAY… not EVENING… this is DAY time… Evening is after six o'clock! :-P).

BIANCA
Bonjour!

NEIGHBOUR
Bonsoir!

(O.S.) BIRDS chirp softly

Bianca looks at her watch, looks back at "neighbour", looks up to the sun for an answer, back to "neighbour" the whole time during Bianca is doing this she has a bewildered look on her face. Although "neighbour" has just gone back to gardening and hasn't noticed any of her expressions/ doings… Of course Bianca's extremely pleased that they haven't and continues her "promenade".

It took me a few minutes to decide whether I wanted to write that in first person form or second, I chose the latter, it sounds more formal! :-P Then I changed it to a screenplay layout; I have an endless amount of skills you know ;-)!

It's true though, when I take Gadget for a walk, it's more like I'm walking him up a tree half the time… he doesn't really stay on ground level. It's extremely hilarious though, one minute he'll be right by my side happily trotting along… the next, his leash is above me and he's hanging on with his little arms wrapped around a large tree trunk. So I usually have to pull him off, making sure I steer clear of trees for the rest of the walk -_-.

Oh yes! Sorry went a little off track on what I was talking about there! So after the first neighbour saying "Bonsoir!", you'll go past the next neighbour, happily say "Bonsoir!" to them… and they'll reply with "BonJOUR!"… I think they just do it to confuse foreigners… Me :-P.

On the Sunday, just passed, we went back to Wilf's house, to help out some more with moving and to just hang out. It was a lot of fun, I even went swimming, let my hair to dry out in the sun without brushing it and found that I have very curly hair… Well not as curly as my mom's but much more wavy than straight! That was exciting!

Well, I always knew that I had curly prone hair since I went to a Shania Twain concert in Ireland when I was about nine years old. You seeee, before we went, my mom, Venetia and I had our hair done in the hairdressers by our house for that night… Oh my word! I asked for curly hair… My hair was worse than… Someone with REALLY, REALLY curly hair :-P. Honestly, the hairdresser took out the curlers and they were all shocked, saying that they'd never seen curlier hair before… My hair usually came down to my shoulders… Yeah, after they'd done that it was afro style… I loved it!

They said "Once the air outside hits it, it should fall a little… When we were leaving, I stepped outside, re-opened the door and yelled through "Has it fallen yet?"… They'd lied, the whole time it stayed the exact same way. Of course I'm not complaining, it was so cute ^_^!

I think it was that day that Venetia got a curl-perm. It was supposed to come out after six months… But took longer than a year, good hairdressers ^_^!

I keep getting sidetracked! On Sunday we saw the evil creature killing another bumblebee! Whilst it was in the act, I took my shoes off and threw them at it… I missed but even with these giant black and white… perhaps slightly smelly :-P, things hurtling towards him, he didn't even let go of the poor bumblebee until he had done his job and had assassinated him :-(.

When we were there we found that there was more than just one but Wilf knew the name of them, at least in French. I've Babelfish-ed and Google-d and still can't find out what the word is in English! I have found various pictures though and even information on them, so if this matches any insect that you know the name of please comment or e-mail me :-)!

In French it is "Les Frelons". "Frelons" are enormous wasps that grow to the average length of three centimetres long.

I just used my French <--> English dictionary on my computer… It says it means hornet but hornets don't kill bumblebees do they :-(? I actually wrote a post about getting attacked by hornets in France last year, it's called "I got ATTACKED!!!"… If you click on that <>

Sorry, will continue with the translation; The sting often involves intravenous (within a vein) punctures… I'm sorry, I'm not such a great translator in French, I just translate the words directly, not so good at thinking of a better way of saying it :-P.

Oh woah! I just found out something that may come in useful to you;
Never kill a hornet who is by his nest, he'll make a distress signal… and you can imagine what happens next ;-). Also perfume or other chemicals can also trigger the attacks as they can think of it as a distress signal from one of their own :-O.

In November I'm going to a wedding in Paris! A Scottish wedding, that is :-P. It'll be the first wedding that I've ever been to. So I'm unbelievably excited, I've even gotten a red tartan dress to go with the theme ^_^. It's the cutest thing ever, a strapless 1950's rockabilly style :-)… Eeeee! Exciting :-P. I'm sure my mom will be getting hundreds of pictures ;-).

Venetia and I were going through my blog a few days ago and we realised that I hadn't written about her accident :-O! Unbelievable… except it is believable because I checked tonnes of times over and over again :-P.

In March Venetia and I went to the ice-rink as usual, it was a somewhat ordinary day until DISASTER struck -_-. Venetia took a tumble and split open her eyebrow! It was extremely scary but the staff there were really nice. The hospitals and doctors are really great in this part of France. A few hours, an inflated head and six stitches later she was home. We didn't go ice-skating for the following two weeks though. Venetia's main worry when she was lying on the ice with her head bleeding was whether or not there'd be a huge scar… Five months later and you can't even notice it!

Speaking of ice-skating! Wooo! About an hour ago (13:30) the ice-rink'll be open in exactly five days! It's like Christmas… except without anything Christmas-sy… There's ice though… lots and lots of ice!! Four months ago I thought… I'll NEVER be able to survive without the ice-rink! Finally my lifeline is back… in five WHOLE days! How will I make it!?!?! :-P

On Tuesday, I think it was… Gadget went to the vet for the first time… As cat owners will know, the first time to the vet is the worst. Gadget had to get a blood test and he squealed like a girl! He even bit the nurse and also cried when the veterinary doctor looked into his ears. He didn't have such a great day, also having to get all of his shots. It was so cute though, after having his blood samples, he crawled up into my mom's arms and when she had to put him back on the table again, he whimpered and tried to hold on.

Of course, by the time we got home he was back to his usual self again :-). Gizmo also had to get his injections, he didn't even cry, instead just burying his face into the shirt of my sister. Aww :-).

Yesterday I walked/ran/danced straight into the wooden piece of an open window in our lounge. It whacked me in the shoulder… Okay, okay! It didn't whack me… SOMEHOW my shoulder and the window collided ;-)… Yes… ehem… somehow :-P… I'm not going to go into too much detail about the "walked/ran/danced" bit!

So anyway, my shoulder collided with the window, which knocked me straight down making my knee whack off the coffee table… Now every time I bend my knee or touch my shoulder, it brings severe pain… Well not severe pain… but it's painful enough! :-P

Today I put egg on my face to make it all nice and soft… I hate doing that! The last time I did it was in Ireland, I think :-P. It's absolutely horrible, something I PERSUADE every single person who has any thoughts about doing it, not to… EVER!... Unless of course you REALLY, REALLY have a need for a silky soft face… OR you have no sense of smell :-). See, you take the white of the egg and rub it all over your face, it smells… I'm not even going to give it a descriptive word… It just smells!

Then you can't move ANY muscles in your face whatsoever, you just have to sit there… expressionless. It's harder than it sounds, my mom started playing music, so I did the move your feet heel, toe, heel, toe sideways, making a number 1 with your fingers and going in waves with arms across the room… Just this made me crack up… Then of course I just HAD to look up egg pranks on Youtube… BAD idea! I laughed… it didn't crack the mask though :-). After a good twenty to thirty minutes later, it was all dry, so I quickly washed it off completely… Et voila (and ta-dah)! My skin is so soft, silky and smooth now!

I'm not sure if it's worth putting yourself through the smell though /:-\.

Oh hey! Apparently it was supposed to be THE END OF THE WORLD on Wednesday the 10th… That would've sucked, like, one more week until the ice-rink re-opened but nooo the world had to go off and end -_-. Heehee, views of the "Large Hadron Collider" (LHC) by a fourteen year old girl :-P.

Okay! I think that I'm off now to go suntan, the sun's almost off the patio and I don't really want to have to lie on the grass :-P. I'm trying to get the last of the summer sun before winter's in, so that I'll be a little bronze nut and everyone else will be milk bottles! :-P It's not usually a good idea to blend in with the ice… people will have a tendency to knock into you… I don't actually know this… But it was funny… In my head :-P. I have way too much fun in my head -_-.

Heehee! Hoping to hear from you guys soon! Leave me a comment about anything! I will reply :-P.

- Bianca

Reminder about my e-mail address for newer readers- kissmyfishy@gmail.com. But I do prefer that comments are left instead! :-)

Also in case you don't quite know how to get to my older posts, scroll down to the very bottom of this page and hit the "Older Posts" button to the right, it's in dark green… perhaps brown /:\. Hope this helps :-). Also if you want to get to the very, very beginning of my blog, you don't have to go colliding protons together (Haha! I'm funny in a nerdy kind of way… nah, I'm just plain funny :-P) instead just keep scrolling and hitting "Older Posts" :-D. Or you can go to the right-hand side at the top of the page down to "archives… let's go fishing" and select a date.

And also: Remember to click through my Adsense; Google Ads :-P… Hint, hint, wink, wink, nudge, nudge! Yeah, that was totally not casually said /:-\.

Eeeeowww! And that noise wasn’t coming from Gadget :-P

2008-09-06T20:58:00.007+02:00

Hey guys!

Okay, I know it’s been a while since I last wrote but I was away for six days! And with being “away” somewhere comes something interesting to write about ^_^!

Every morning’s the same for me… Usually :-P. I’ll be woken up by Gadget’s non-stop meows… Well they’re hardly anything like a meow, it’s more an extremely painful long “MEEEOOOOOOWWWWOOOO”. It simply can’t be ignored! When I let him out of his room, Gizmo usually follows and waits in front of the door to say good morning to Gadget. It is one of the sweetest things ever! Gadget will come out and make little “mrp-ing” noises, completely ignoring me to run up to Gizmo and cuddle up against him. Awww!

After fifteen minutes or so of stroking and loving Gizmo and Gadget, Gadget will become tiresome and want to be fed… This is the painful part :-P.

The one morning I was making Gadget’s breakfast but Gadget being Gadget, got a little impatient waiting for me. Suddenly this THING was on me! I gasped as I looked down; holding on for dear life was, who else, Gadget!

He had jumped up and flung his little… little but SHARP… and DEADLY nails into my shirt… and partly into the soft flesh just below my ribs… Eeeeowww! And that noise wasn’t coming from Gadget :-P. He gave a last final “cute little puppy dog… but kitty cat eyes” and let go on his grasp. I’ll never know how he manages to jump so high! As he was getting ready for another “gut-ripping” pounce, I decided to quickly put his food on the floor to save my skin! :-P

Gadget is such a starvo! He’ll push his head in the way of Gizmo’s to get at Gizmo’s food, whilst his bowl is still half full of his own breakfast… He’s a right little boy :-P!

After breakfast Gizmo and Gadget will wrestle for ages or play chasing games then eventually fall down too tired to move! That’s a typical morning for them!

Last Saturday, we set off to a place about a good hour or so from my little town called “Bessieres” which is where Gui-Gui and Wilf, friends of ours, live. I’ve written about them before in “Saturday… which actually felt like Sunday because of going out on Friday, the Friday which felt like a Saturday…”. It was the first time Gadget would be going for a long car trip. This is excluding the twenty minute drive that it took to bring him home from where we got him from.

We thought he’d be fine with just sleeping on my sister’s lap the whole way, since he was like that with me for the twenty minutes… But oh no! He was the most squirmy, wriggly thing I’ve ever seen! And especially the most noisy! We gave up eventually trying to hold him and stopped at a shop that took us out of our way to go to, to buy him a cat carrier.

It was the BEST buy ever!!! The only thing that was unpreventable was the meow, meow, meooooww, meow?-ing. It was okay though, we made a “Meowxican” wave out of it… My dad made up the name of course :-P. See, Gadget would meow then I would then it would go to my mom, my dad, to Venetia, then back to Gadget… Gizmo didn’t approve and just kept on snoring. Eventually though Gadget got fed up and just fastened up his meows -_-. After half an hour he fell asleep for a few minutes, only to be awoken again when we went around a round about! <--Talk about a tongue twister :-P.

We arrived and all was well though! That Saturday we didn’t do anything too laborious… Unless you think swimming and relaxing by the pool is hard work :-P. Personally, I don’t! We had come down… or up… Yes it’s north of my little town to see Wilf and Gui-Gui, because they were planning on moving and they’d done so much for us we wanted to help!

So on Sunday, my mom, Venetia and I set off to clean the one room out, I think my fear of spiders is now definitely cured! Okay, actually it was cured a long time ago when I let one run across my hand, but now I mean really, really cured! I shan’t ever squeal when I see one, ever again. All my squeals are out of me now with the amount of spiders in there :-P.

We had lunch and then it was back to the pool time! The next couple of days was just spent packing. On Wednesday, we got up at the ungodly hour of five o’clock. We were on the road by six and heading for Marseille, a long five hour drive from Bessieres. The route was absolutely stunning, as the day got brighter, and we got closer and closer to Marseille I was becoming… a lot more sleepy! By eleven AM we were almost there, a little bit later we could even see the house!! But as we made our way through the busy traffic and finally got to the little cobbled street right before the turning to go onto the road and to the new house DISTASTER struck!

The van… truck that my mom was driving and which also contained all of my parents’ friends’ furniture couldn’t fit between the wall and the church! We were so close! AHHH! After three attempts and a slight bump with the side of the church, we eventually gave up. We took off down the other side of the church, and couldn't get up the narrow road to the house but we were as close as we could get... Here, we offloaded everything, and had to HAUL it up the hill... The very long… STEEP hill :-P.

Okay, okay! It wasn’t that bad but then the story would have been boring, I bring LIFE to my stories :-P.

There were dudes there working on the house... Ehem, I'm sorry I left out a VERY important adjective... LAZY dudes! They helped with the fridge and then went off to stand with their empty wheelbarrow and their shovel... Just standing there... Daydreaming...

Anyway, once we'd hauled everything up the hill then we had to bring them down make-shift stairs (the workmen were definitely taking their time on working -_-), and into the house.

Three hours later we were finally done and everyone was absolutely dead! (Except the builders... they were standing there still smoking cigarettes, relaxing over a shovel, or slurping on fresh figs from the tree...)

And then we had to take the van back to Wilf, see we had to drop "Gui-Gui" off in Marseille with the furniture, Wilf's following in two weeks time.

So it was another "fun" five or so hour drive! Joy!!! :-P

Oh no! Before we could get out and go, we had to ask the two French people who had been so kind in parking in front of the truck to budge :-P, well Gui-Gui did that bit ^_^.

When we got back to Wilf’s place my bed there couldn’t of welcomed me any more than it did :-P.

It was actually a great learning experience, I know now how to read maps and also that I won't ever be moving to a big city (far too much traffic :-P). Marseille was absolutely gorgeous though, it's right on the Mediterranean!

If we'd driven about 3 hours or so north-east from Marseille, we would have hit the border of Italy! That and seeing the "BARCELONA" signs on the motorway make me love where I live. Viva la France!

On Thursday we finally came home, there’s no place like my little town, I never want to move, never, ever, ever! It’s just… I just think this is the perfect place, I’ve never felt more at home… Except of course, when I don’t understand what people say to me… Then of course I feel like the right “étranger”… See what I mean… I had to check that I was right in using that word for “foreigner” -_-!

Oh! When we were at Wilf and Gui-Gui’s they had Sky T.V.! English speaking Sky T.V.!!! I was so excited but only found out closer to the end of our stay so didn’t get much viewing done. I like to just vege sometimes :-P!

The ice-rink! Now that’s news!! In just eleven days it’s going to be re-opened and I’m going to be there! The day is a little awkward: Wednesday the 17th but it’s okay because I can go all three days that it’s open for that week! Wooo! Vivement La Patinoire (I can’t wait for the ice-rink)!!! Free French lesions there ;-). Something schools wouldn’t teach you :-P!

When we were in Bessieres on the day that we were leaving, we witnessed the most horrible, cruel thing I’ve never seen!... You see, it was my mom and my sister who actually saw this EVIL creature attacking the poor, little, fluffy bumblebees! It was approximately four times or so the normal size of a bumble bee! It just… attacked them, so along the ground we spotted a few dying ones, it was so horrible and there was one bumblebee that only had one wing left :-(. We tried to give them a nice leaving with sugar water though :-).

Oh hey! When we were at Wilf and Gui-Gui’s new place I got to see the apartment of Gui-Gui’s friend and :-O… I was so impressed with his glasses, not spectacles, I mean drinking glasses… They matched the WHOLE interior, it was really new-age, with bizarre shaped chairs and even a giant “fatboy” (no, I’m not insulting anyone, it’s the brand name :-P) hammock in the centre of the room… The glasses were red and squonky… Awesome!!

Oh yes… About that Video Blog… I tried to do it but I had to take, like, a million takes, over and over again because I’d turn the camera on… and then just freeze up! It’s unbelievably weird talking to a camera, I appreciate “V-loggers” so much more now! :-P I will attempt to do it again this week but I’m not promising anything too wild!

Oooooh! Guess what I got!! A reader sent me in a picture of… Well you’ll see! Thank you very much to you for the awesome drawing! ^_^

Okay! I’m going to leave you at that and I promise to try and write soon… But that’s all of my news so far and I usually am a lacker of new news :-P.

Hoping to hear from you all soon!!

- Bianca

I’m going to go shower!

2008-08-23T14:40:00.004+02:00

Good Saturday afternoon everyone!

So today, shall be a VERY exciting day, heehee, exciting for me is usually quite a small insignificant thing that happens… but this REALLY is going to be exciting… For the whole world of Kiss My Fishy anyway!!! Mwa ha ha ha ha!!!

Ehem… So yes, today, I have decided, that I’m going to go shower!... Okay, I do this everyday… but that’s the beginning of creating my very first “vlog”! Yep, that’s right, I’ve promised it before but now I’m really ready to do it! A vlog, for all of those people who aren’t so familiar with the term, is basically a blog, but a Video bLOG.

My mom’s been putting up a few videos, some of Gizmo and Gadget play fighting (Awww!) and others, so if you want to check those out her Youtube channel is – “http://www.youtube.com/user/Siovhinn”.

I have a new short poem for you guys! I’m going to post it, without the title, and then you can guess, at the end of this blog I’ll give you the answer to what it’s about!

*************************************************
You’re pulled and tugged at all night long,
You’re beaten and thrashed at because you’re wrong,
And when you don’t get a bed to lay upon,
You are in the cupboard left alone.

By Bianca Cassandra P.
*************************************************

I haven’t got much news, so like last time, this is going to be another randomer!

I’ve been meaning to write about someone that I haven’t heard for, for over a year, despite my attempts to get in touch. He was one of the nicest people that I’d met in Ireland. He was Francis!
Francis was a farmer that we met the year before we left Ireland, when we moved into “Hillside” the large 1900’s farm house. It was the coolest house EVER! It had these gorgeous carpets and curtains… and wallpaper, it really was magnificent. It even came with an AGA stove… AND a hidden stairway (this would have been the staircase used by the maid in the olden days, as it went straight through down to the kitchen and was the closest to the smallest bedroom of five)… It was so much fun to trick our friends, who didn’t know about it, with.

So yes! I get way too distracted!! Francis, he had the roughest hands, but the softest soul. He was born in Ireland, and had never left. When he was younger, Francis had been sent to the school in Northern Ireland “Friends” as a border. He was always longing for home though and decided that he wanted to take after his father, and sow the land.

It’s bizarre to think, that just by looking at a person, you know very little. If you passed someone in the street, you wouldn’t think, ahh, she can speak French and play the guitar… You just don’t know. With Francis, he was the last person I would have thought of to have a large pen collection, or his millions of post cards that he collected.

He even let my mom drive his combine harvester because she’d said that she’d always wanted to drive one. One day, he took us up to one of the old barns to show us his toys that he’d kept since he was a little boy. One was a little tin car that had a plastic man stuck inside it… It’d been stuck there for years :-P!

Even though I enjoy moving around and having the opportunity to go adventuring, I think it would also be nice to be someone who stays in one little town for their whole life and doesn’t just have memories, but the items from when they were younger too. I think the oldest thing that I have… bear in mind, I am only 14 years old!... Would have to be Gizmo :-P… 7 years is quite some time you know ;-P.

Francis dresses up as Santa and goes to the local schools in his area for Christmas, he even saved a school by raising one million pounds for it. He cried when we said our last goodbye the day before we left for Sicily, I thought it was the sweetest thing…

Missing you Francis, I hope that you come across this page someday :-).

Right, I think that I’m going to go shower… It’s “vlogging” time!!! I’ll try get it up on KissMyFishy’s Youtube channel and then straight onto here by today, but if not, it’ll definitely be up during this week.

Hoping to hear from you guys soon!

- Bianca

P.S. By the way, the poem was about a blanket ^_^.

Fudge, Licorice, Coconut... And Others Who Go By The Names Of Non-Food Products ^_^!

2008-08-11T13:26:00.009+02:00

Hey guys!

I’ve decided to write a blog today because I feel bad that I can’t recall the exact date of my last post… I’m not getting very far too quickly with writing because every two seconds I keep having a fit of coughs… It’s unbelievably frustrating! I caught, what we think is, a summer cold a few days after getting Gadget, the kitten.

So I haven’t been feeling my best and haven’t been out since either… I also am not having a great time because I can’t really talk as much, as that usually leads to… would you believe it, more coughing! And I’m a very talkative person, so when I try and get a long story out in one quick sentence, I’m usually running out of breath at the end so it sounds like a deflating balloon.

As I said, I haven’t been out, so I haven’t got much news… therefore this shall be a very random post ^_^.

Since I’ve been living… I don’t really know any other way to put it… Since I was born! That works, I’ve had an enormous amount of pets… Well my parents had literally gazillions of birds and a couple of dogs on our property in Zimbabwe, but the animals that stand out for me the most are:

Nando, he was my green ring neck parrot when I was one or two until I was three years old. When we were FORCED to leave the country though, I had to leave him behind, so my parents gave him to friends of theirs… He was just learning to speak as well! Since I had to leave him, I’ve wanted another parrot since, not to take over the memory of Nando, of course, but just because I love animals and I’ve always had this vision of a parrot school… Okay, okay! I had that thought when I was seven… and yet, seven years down the line, I still want to make it happen :-P.

Except this time I would love to get an African Grey parrot, since they’re the smartest bird species, and I think they’re so gorgeous! Of course I’d have to get one now though since they can live up to 100 years of age… Hint, hint, wink, wink Mom and Dad! :-P It’d also have to be a baby… because it’s cute… Yeah, I know… lame excuse :-P.

My next BIG pet, well very little at the time, was Franklin my tortoise… or was he a turtle? I always get confused with the two… Anyway, yes Franklin was called Franklin because I was about four or five years old and I loved the children’s cartoon show “Franklin” about the turtle that went to school :-P. I remember Franklin’s first water slide sort of thing, and the way he used his little tiny claws to climb over my hand… And of course, how he smelt, so extremely bad… I don’t think that’s the reason we gave him away though, I’m not sure, but I think it was because we were moving up to Northern Ireland. This was when we were living in Southern Ireland by the way, we gave Franklin to a zoo.

In Southern Ireland I also had two pet fish, Sandy and Danny, because my favourite film at that time was “Grease”. My cousin came to stay with us for a while, and Sandy had guppies… My cousin, being a boy, thought that it would be cool to buy one of those miniature shark fish for my fish tank… Aww how sweet… Not! He put it into the tank, it chased the poor babies which luckily hid away into the castle ornament and survived, but one of my big fish (Sandy or Danny, I can’t remember which one it was) was attacked and killed before we removed the shark fish… I was so annoyed -_-. Before we moved up to Northern Ireland, we also gave the fish away.

We actually obtained quite a few pets in Ireland, my dad took Venetia and I up to a woman and we were allowed to choose a kitten each… Sadly though, this is when we realised that I was allergic and after less than two weeks of having them, we had to give them away.

My dad also took us to get two baby rabbits… I don’t think these lasted with us for more than two weeks as well. The neighbour’s dog kept getting into our garden every time we let the bunnies run around for a while, and once attacked Venetia’s. It was okay afterwards though. But the bunnies proved to be too much of a hassle to look after in the house, they really need to have a large area of land that’s secure.

Then in Ireland when I was seven years old, my parents gave Venetia and I a decision to make, we could choose to go to Disneyland for two weeks, or we could choose to get a puppy Shih-Tzu instead. Of course, we chose the Shih-Tzu!

Gizmo was the runt of the litter, when we went to the old couple’s house, there were a bunch of little puppies sleeping, pretty much on top of each other, all squished up. Gizmo was the quiet one, all on his own in the very corner of the cage. I wanted to get the one that looked like a hamster… but when my mom picked up the smallest one, and showed him to me, I fell in love.

He was completely black except for his chin, his chest and his one paw, so it looked like a little sock. Gizmo was originally called Othello, but soon changed because he looked more like a little gremlin. I think we must of seen him at two weeks, because for the three weeks that followed, on the Sunday, we were sure to drive the hour, just to see him. At five weeks old, she let us take him home.

This is Gizmo, 5 weeks old, in Venetia's (at the time 11 years old) arms... Now you can see how small he really was... Awww!!!

We were absolutely appalled by the fact that she told us that Shih-Tzu’s are to be kept in a cage, and are to be taught to drink out of a hamster/ gerbil bottle feeder… The cage lasted the first night then we quickly got rid of it. He’s a pedigree, his grandfather lived until he was 18 years old, so I’m really hoping he lives that long, or even longer :-P. He even has a show name and the papers, but we think that it’s cruel to keep their hair long, so we let him be, like his show name, a “Sporty Boy”.

Gizmo is my baby! He is the kindest, sweetest little thing you could ever have as a dog! We don't even think of him as a dog, he's far too intelligent to be put under that genre :-P. Okay! Sometimes... he can be smart, most of the time, he's smart enough, in the "smart enough way" to ignore us when we call him, or demand him to do tricks... That's how clever he really is :-P.

We also had “HotRocks”, he was a little orange kitty cat, that my parents brought home one night, as a surprise. We kept him for quite a while actually but soon had to give him to my great grandmother as my allergies were still too bad. He went through a million different names, but in the end, the last name given was HotRocks, because of how he walked :-P… Like he was stepping on hot rocks.

We also had Fudge, my hamster, Fudge ran away once... You see, I woke up one cold school morning in Northern Ireland, to find that one of the tunnels that connected to the hamster cage had come off! I quickly ran to the cage on the other side of my bedroom, to find that there was no Fudge there! After searching my room from top to bottom, I was forced to give up and go to school.

When Venetia and I got home, the hunt began again, a few hours later Gizmo began to bark wildly at Venetia’s cupboard. We moved the furniture to get to it, and placed some hamster pebbles where there was a hole that the hamster could have gotten in to. After being quite for ten minutes and waiting patiently, Fudge slowly emerged. I caught him and returned him to his cage, the fall from his cage must have proved too much for him though, because a week or so later, he fell ill… DUN DUN DUNNNN!

No, honestly though…

We took him to the vet, and he told us that he’d have to put him down. I didn’t realise how much I was attached to Fudge until that day, I couldn’t stop crying on the way home.

Rascal… Now Rascal, my word, did he live up to his name! He was Venetia’s 16th birthday present. A couple of weeks before Venetia’s birthday, we were walking in a park, and suddenly my mom said “Would you like another Shih-Tzu puppy for your birthday?”. It was quite a shock, and suddenly everything just happened so quickly, we bought a “Buy & Sell” newspaper (Not sure if you get it in America… or any other country outside of the U.K. for that matter, it’s just like a newspaper full of ads, by people) and we’d found a woman that was selling what we were looking for.

Rascal - That day

We called her up and within half an hour we were on our way to see her. It’s always how we’ve done it, we just rush into buying pets :-P! Venetia chose Rascal and a few weeks later he was at home with us. He was the naughtiest little thing, that was just so hard to train! Gizmo was very tolerant with him, but eventually Rascal was just too much and we gave him to our great grandmother. Her husband had just passed away so he lifted up her spirits again ^_^. Rascal became very settled down with her, and now is a lovely dog.

Rascal... As The Rascal :-P

In Northern Ireland we also had two budgies. Bashful, was my little blue one. We called him Bashful because of his stance, how he tilted his head, made him seem very shy. Chirpy, was much more lively… and well… you guessed it, very noisy!! Sadly though, one morning, I came down stairs, at 11 o’clock to find… Bashful… he was lying on his back :-(… With his little feet sticking up in the air… Bashful had died!!! I was so upset, we made a little coffin and buried him in the back garden. A little while later Chirpy flew away… It’s not fair that I love animals sooo much but they just don’t seem to work out with me 0_o.

We also, I’m not sure if I’ve already told you, had chickens for a while. That was also a very quick decision… Well see, I’d been wanting them for a while, since we’d moved onto the farm. And one day my mom and Karen (my grandmother) took Venetia and I to this local petting zoo, sort of place… We had just gone to see if they sold them… but ended up bringing six home.

Coconut was mine, Liquorice was Venetia’s and then there was Phoenix, Tawny, Little Feather and Kaleidoscope. They were so cute! We brought them home in a box and put them in the little front room, for my dad to see… Of course none of us wanted to tell him that we’d just brought home six chickens, so we left it to my mom :-P. He was really cool with it in fact ^_^.

Liquorice!

I taught Coconut to run to me and jump into my arms… I miss her :-(. We gave them away after quite a long time of having them, they’d just started laying eggs as well. But because we had two roosters in the lot, and my sister’s bedroom was closest to the barn that we kept them in, there was quite a lot of complaining about being woken up at all hours of the morning by them… It seemed that they didn’t know when dawn was… I don’t think the sun comes up at three in the morning in winter in Northern Ireland…

But that’s not the reason we gave them away of course :-P. We were due to leave for Sicily soon after ^_^.

Coconut!

In my time of keeping animals, I’ve also had “Sea Monkeys” and “Triops” quite a few times. It’s incredible how fast they grow, and they’re a lot of fun to watch, Triops do not have three eyes like the box says though!! They lied -_-!

And then of course there’s Gadget! I’ve told you all about Gadget before but I have even more information on Bengal cats now! So apparently he’s going through a stage that Bengal cats go through called “The Fuzzy Uglies”. It means that they get little white tips on the end of their fur, which camouflages their colours more. That happens at about three weeks old, which is when they would start exploring more in the wild. It’ll pass at around four to nine months so their true colours will show through and their markings will become more defined, so Gadget will just keep getting more and more beautiful! The pictures were just taken with my webcam, I'll get more high-quality ones from my mom another time ^_^.

Aww Cute! See his markings now? I can just imagine how stunning he'll be when he's all grown up ^_^.

I want a lizard. This will be my next pet… I’m hoping so anyway! I just have this thing about them. I love them so much! I caught a baby one the size of my baby finger in the garden yesterday. I was going to keep him as a pet, but thought that it was cruel to take him out of the wild. My ideal lizard would have to be an African Gecko… or a Chameleon, now that would be cool! Never put a chameleon on a black background though! Apparently, they get so upset and angry that their sides split… and they more or less explode… Of course I don’t know if this is just a myth or not, will “Google” that and tell you next time… Oooh, something to look forward to :-P.
Eeek! I’m sorry that I wrote an essay for you guys to read -_-.

It's absolutely stunning weather here, but with stunning weather... comes the sun... and the sun, is at times, a little too much to take. So, thankfully, it's cooled down an awful lot since yesterday, and now I can go relax outside, instead of in front of my fan in my bedroom... Yay, outdoors!!!

- Bianca

In loving memory of Fudge, the hamster. (Even though I know he’s not extremely likely to read this :-P, it feels nice to put it there.)

Happy 1st birthday Kiss My Fishy!!!

2008-08-02T23:31:00.002+02:00

Hey guys!

I’m sorry for the wait again! I always forget to write up a Kiss My Fishy blog and then realise a little down the “line” and think "Oh no!!! It's been "insert a long amount of time here" since I last wrote up a blog!!"... And it's like my online memory, so if I forget what I did, or in what order, VWOOP, up I bring it ^_^. Extremely handy :-).

My word, I have so much news since last week!! The Tuesday past is really where the news is… We had to wake up at five in the morning… I wasn’t even sure that this time EXSISTED ;-)! Apparently it does... And my parents just HAD to prove it to me... By waking me up at that time! Well see I actually agreed to waking up (provided that there was espresso!)… But that’s not the point!

You see, Charlie (the Irish visitor, which I wrote about in my last post), his flight was at eight, or some ghastly hour like that… So in order to have at LEAST two hours to get ready, it was necessary to be awake early and then the drive is a good hour into Carcassonne, like I said before.

Once we where there, we dropped Charlie off, and went straight to the deathly-empty castle grounds of Carcassonne. We were there by half past eight and walked around, thoroughly enjoying it, for four hours. By the time Gizmo had given up on his legs and had chosen just to be dragged everywhere, we decided to head home. But the day doesn’t end there! I fell asleep in the car, and was unbelievably cranky when I woke up… and hungry! Even if I did eat a couple of hours before…

Anyway, we stopped at a pet store to see if they would clip Gizmo’s nails. I have no idea what happened to me, but I suddenly lost all of my French, and couldn’t figure anything out! I’m guessing it was because I’d just come back to life from being in a dead sleep, and my body wasn’t quite ready for being thrown back into reality again.
Eventually I got the message across and Gizmo was making… some-what-like-a-angry-monkey-noises... Honestly! That dog can moan! Once the lady was done, and I had gotten my French back in order, I asked her if she knew of any places where we could find a kitten. She had no idea -_-.

You seeee, my parents had been talking about getting a kitten, since we found out that I was no longer allergic… or at least not allergic to Wilf and Gi-Gi’s cat Billy (they are the couple who came over for the barbeque in my post “Saturday… which actually felt like Sunday because of going out on Friday, the Friday which felt like a Saturday…”)… So yes! The search began…

When we arrived home, my mom checked the post and found that there were two ads in the English speaking-French paper (I know my dad’s going to make a pun out of that one -_- :-P) that suited us, so I called them, and actually understood half of the address! When I say half… I mean… I got us in the right area, and from there we knocked on doors and asked people if they knew a woman who was selling a little, white kitten… There was absolutely no mobile signal out in this little rural area, 20 minutes away from my little town, so I couldn’t even do my MAIN plan! This was telling the woman that we were opposite the graveyard. Could she please come find us?... Okay not exactly rocket science, but it would have made my life so much easier.

After being an hour late for the “rendezvous”, we were almost about to give up, but decided to give it one last shot! Knocking on the door sealed my fate… Out came an elderly woman, who was missing more teeth that any person should be missing… She was soon followed by a tired looking, grey-haired, stout, man, who was rather menacing, without a shirt on and his tan in the shape of a vest…

They were actually extremely nice; we asked them and the man, pointed towards the hill, mumbling to his wife. Soon the wife was making a box shape with her hands saying “veranda”, after repeating the movement a few times. She changed the subject, and asked if we were here on holiday or not. Five minutes later, we were back trekking up the hill to the little house, where we found, another elderly couple, who pointed us further up the hill.

There, was a woman in a hammock, I repeated the sentence about looking for the woman, and she replied with “C’est moi!” (It’s me!). Relief! She led us into her house and went into a back room where she brought out a little white kitten, and also a Bengal. I fell in love immediately, but we couldn’t decide which one would be best for Gizmo’s sake and the kittens’.

After choosing… and getting down the hill, we changed our minds, and did a quick swap. I think that the lady (who I still have not learnt the name of -_-) was actually upset, but I’d set my heart on the tiger one! Two weeks before we’d even chosen the kitten my parents had a name ready… “Gadget”! It doesn’t quite work in French though, so it takes a while to explain why Gadget is called Gadget (The reason… only because of Gizmo’s name ^_^). He is the most gorgeous little thing! On top he’s like a little tiger, except not orange more blacky-brown, (his nose is so adorable, it looks absolutely identical to that of a tiger cub) but when he rolls over onto his stomach he shows the colouring of a cheetah! I will be getting up some pictures of Gizmo and Gadget together soon!

They’re still a little bit weary of each other but over the past four days they’ve progressed immensely with not minding being around one another. Gadget will be three months old on the 8th of August, which means that he was born on the 8th of May. The same day as Venetia! Aww, he’s a Taurus!

I have another poem for you! This isn’t written exactly how I usually would write a poem (the story just popping into my head and me going with it) instead when Charlie was here, he gave me the first sentence and a half (The river danced its merry way and sang its happy song, A songbird soared on high) and I was supposed to finish the poem.

Two minutes later, I was done, and called Charlie back. Of course, since it was intending on being a happy, summer poem, he wasn’t impressed on how I’d twisted it around… I love it though!

It’s a story… I wouldn’t actually harm any creature, especially a songbird -_-. You just have to be open-minded when you read it ;-)! You see, the world just keeps going on, no matter what… That’s what it was intended to say anyway :-P.

************************************************
The river danced its merry way and sang its happy song,
A songbird soared on high, and then was shot on down,
The world turned grey, the night took over,
A child in the distance cried for his mother,
The war had began, the dust had lifted,
As the songbird slowly drifted,
Down below he hit the earth,
That was the sudden birth,
The shots rang out loudly,
And still the river swayed mildly.

By Bianca Cassandra P.
************************************************

Oh hey! I just noticed something that I can’t believe I didn’t notice on the right day!! Happy 1st birthday Kiss My Fishy!!! Yes, I posted the first Kiss My Fishy post up a whole year ago now, since 8th of July last year :-O… It’s hard to believe that it’s flown by so quickly! Since I didn’t make such a big fuss over this, I shall be sure to make a HUGE fuss over “My 50th and 100th Posts” :-P! Look forward to it ;-).

Okay! I think that I’m going to make some hot chocolate and then head off to bed. I’m extremely tired, so shall read through this tomorrow morning and make sure it makes enough sense then.

Hoping to hear from you guys soon!

- Bianca

ROCK ON!!!

2008-07-27T11:21:00.009+02:00

Hey everyone!

I know it’s been a while since I’ve written, and now I feel especially bad that I neglected Kiss My Fishy this month. My mom checked how many hits it has had last night and it’s … Okay I can’t really remember but it’s fewer than 200, and above 100… That’s a lot for me :-).

So let’s dip into the news! Yesterday after spending a day in town with Venetia (my sister), we came home and played badminton on the patio with my mom and a visitor that’s over here from Ireland (will get around to Charlie in a few). It was an enjoyable “doubles” game, until DISASTER struck!!! As the badminton came hurtling down towards me, in its angel like way, I missed :-O… And it landed behind the chair… Okay not so exciting, I know… Not so gasp-able either (since I usually miss :-P).

See, I seemed to have failed to see the ever-so-mean-jutting-out-there-to-hurt-you corner of the chair, so as I bent over, eye only on the shuttle-cock, “GADOOF!”, straight into the chair. Forgetting completely about the badminton, I dropped my racket and held my eye as the pain struck. I did actually cry but I wasn’t whiney! It just seemed to be my reflexes that made my eyes suddenly gush with tears, although I controlled myself and Victoria Falls only lasted a few minutes :-P.

My sister… laughed. Venetia does that EVERY single time I get hurt… But it makes me laugh as well so it’s okay :-). And she doesn’t laugh because she’s mean, I think that’s also just her reflexes :-P… Yes, that’s right! Blame it all on the reflexes ;-)!

Straight away we were back to the game. I couldn’t let Charlie and Venetia win THAT easily… Of course, they still won though, when they beat us by reaching 21 first… twice… >.<.

My mom set to the medical work and after… many… many minutes of trying to clear all of my eye make-up off and having one butterfly stitch put on the small cut on my eyelid, I …
I’m sorry Venetia’s bothering me at the moment so I can’t seem to concentrate -.-.
I was fine again :-). Of course, I got “You wear too much make-up” from my mom, but of course I do. I’m a teenager, it’s appropriate to wear inappropriate amounts of make-up! :-)

Charlie even made me an eye-patch! Wooo! Heehee, will have to try get a picture of that on me :-P. I thought it would be a brilliantly clever idea to put ice on my eye to bring down the slight swelling… It just made my eyeball cold :-P.

Soiree DJ, which was on the 13th, was one of the coolest nights I’ve been to! Like I said in my post “”I-Have-No-Idea-What-You’re-Saying-To-Me-So-I’ll-Just-Smile-And- Nod”… Smiling and nodding doesn’t actually work by the way…”. “It was more of a teenage thing. Loud “tektonik” music (well, rave music), flashing lights… DJ’s and everything!”… Well of course there would have to be DJ’s but they should really get mentioned for being there either way :-P.

It was so great! It was extremely funny when we got there though, we met up with our friend Chloe and as Venetia pulled out her mobile to start recording, we looked up and two… semi-naked (this IS France you know :-P) woman that had started dancing on the stage. So Venetia quickly put her camera away again :-P.

We even bumped into some girls that we had met in “La Patinoire” (the ice-rink) but had spent time with at the previous night-music thing. That was the “Tektonik” one, which was brilliant as well, I think it was more for younger children, but it wasn’t time wasted :-).

Yes, so we hung out with “Camille” and “Anais” that night. The next day was “Bastille Day” which also happens to be Anais’ birthday!

Bastille Day was brilliant! We went to town and watched the half hour fireworks show, my mom got some amazing photos, and then we walked up to the “Place De Jean Jaures” (the centre), where they were having a “bal”, c’était magnifique! (It was magnificent!)… Again with the loud music, but live bands this time. A really enjoyable night :-).

Yes, so those were the most exciting things happening this month in my little town. Vivement 2009! I can’t wait for 2009! :-P

I can’t believe that we’re already coming up to August. The summer has just flown past. It’s only 7 more week-ends until the ice-rink opens, which is really bizarre for me! I thought that I’d never be able to get through summer without it… Now I think it’ll be strange when it re-opens :-P. But never-the-less looking forward to it unbelievably!! Try get my crossovers back on TRACK… Heehee, sorry it’s been a while since I made a not-so-funny pun :-).

Ahh, now back to Charlie! On the Wednesday just past, we set out on the hour and a little bit long trip to Carcassone. To drop off my grandmother (Karen), who’d been living with us for two months, but has now set off back to England. Charlie was supposed to arrive 10 minutes later, but of course, being any visitor coming to us, his plane decided to be a good hour late. So we just hung out and had lunch. Eventually Charlie arrived. It was so great to see him after a year and five months of being out of Ireland.

Oh! You know what else happened! So a couple of days into Charlie being here, he said that I had an American accent, of course I didn’t believe him, retorting that it was a very colonial accent. But yesterday, I stopped in “Glup’s” to talk to two English girls that were here on holiday. Explaining that I don’t get to speak to many English-speaking people, and that it’s a nice relief from battling with French all of the time… After I told them that I had lived in Ireland before France, one of their jaws actually dropped and she said “You sound American!”. My poor accent’s so confused with the Zimbabwean, and Southern Irish, and Northern Irish, and Sicilian, and French…

I don’t mind of course! But I would love to just have an accent that people can tell where I’m from… Then again, I guess that’s not so mysterious :-P.

Oh hey! I drew my first hand the other day! So I’m about to photocopy that in. It’s a ROCK ON (Yes, it deserves capital letters :-P) hand. Oh! I was looking through all of my poems because I was 100% sure that I’d written a new one, but couldn’t find it anywhere, then realised that it might still be in my cupboard. It was there, on a crumpled piece of paper, so about to write it up :-). I hope you guys enjoy it, it has a twist at the end :-). I just realised that I have more drawings that I’ve yet to put up!

************************************************
Shoot me in the head,
Knock me down once,
I’d never began living,
And now I’m gone,
My life never flashed,
As all of my systems crashed,
I lay there silently,
Feeling my heart pounding,
That warmth of the blood,
In my ears, from my mouth,
Rising higher and higher,
The pain came rushing,
I felt, I had hit the ground,
From being thrown out of a high-rise building,
Then all went silent, peaceful, black,
As I left, my body spasmed,
There was no place in this world,
For a manic depressant,
No! I was wrong,
Dear God, what on Earth, had I done?!

By Bianca Cassandra P.

************************************************

Okay, I’m going to go enjoy my Sunday in the sun now. Hoping to hear from you guys soon!

- Bianca

Saturday… which actually felt like Sunday because of going out on Friday, the Friday which felt like a Saturday…

2008-07-07T15:12:00.001+02:00

Hey everyone!

Okay, so over the past three days I’ve actually been busy doing… okay well I wouldn’t say busy but I’ve been enjoying summer to it’s fullest!!

On Friday (Yes Friday, I know! Aren’t the holidays just the best :-P) Venetia and I met up in town with three of our French (I have to stop categorising them under “French”… what other type of Friends would I be going out with over here /: ) friends and we walked to a studio sort of place. Where we met a friend of Adelyne’s (Melanie the drummer), and there we “jammed”. It was so much fun!

Usually I’m extremely shy about my voice but this time, I just thought, Aww what the heck! And sang for a bit, of course I didn’t want to play the band’s music on my guitar… I haven’t really practised improvising… Can you practise improvisation /:-S? Anyhoo, yes I’ve never improvised, so decided to leave that to the other guitarist there :-P. Then we went back to town, and all in all it was great! Finally making friends here ^_^.

The following day, Saturday… which actually felt like Sunday because of going out on Friday, the Friday which felt like a Saturday… So on the “real” Saturday Venetia and I met up with a friend and went to the outdoor swimming pool! Extremely confusing, since I’ve never been to an outdoor public pool in my life.

It was quite fun actually, although I put my body through shock. See we went straight outside and jumped into that pool, I thought it was an alright temperature but half an hour to an hour later when we decided to head on inside, and I bombed into that pool, I was shocked by the temperature, I thought I was going to die of the heat! So was soon back outside again… which I soon regretted :-P… Everything felt so much colder than it had been before, because now my body had warmed up >.<. Even worse! The clouds had decided to just come over and smother the sunshine up! I decided to just brace myself for it though, I had lived in Ireland for most of my life anyway! What’s another few minutes of shivers and shakes? :-P

On Sunday, the Sunday which really should have been Monday, but wasn’t, we had a barbeque in the rain :-P. Living in South-West France and all, we had sort of just expected the weather to be top-notch like always… We’ve been taking the weather for granted recently! But the barbeque was so much fun and the lovely couple we know here, who we’d invited and who’d driven two hours to get to us, had seemed to have a great time, so all was good. It was brilliant to get to practise my French, without getting flustered. And I even learnt quite a few interesting phrases :-P. The weather hasn’t improved much, but by “Meteo France” it shall be 23 degrees in my little town tomorrow :-). Vive la France! Today I actually feel like doing a bit of work, so going to practice my guitar and “maybe”, emphasise on the maybe, learn more French words :-P. Hoping to hear from you guys soon!

- Bianca

“I-Have-No-Idea-What-You’re-Saying-To-Me-So-I’ll-Just-Smile-And-Nod"... Smiling and nodding doesn't actually work by the way...

2008-06-27T12:25:00.008+02:00

Hey Everyone!

Okay, I know it’s been a while since I wrote but now I actually have news ^_^... New art and a poem! Last Saturday, was ”LA FETE DE LA MUSIQUE” (THE MUSIC FESTIVAL)... It deserves caps lock :-P. So in my little town, there were bands set up everywhere! So at half past eight, we all set down there, and it was absolutely brilliant!! Music, and people everywhere, even a French Tribute Band to AC/DC! Have to say that was my favourite set up, the loud grumbling music running through your veins, flashing lights, roaring crowd, lovely weather, can't get any better than that :-P... So yes, evidently I enjoyed it very much.

The next Music related thing happening in my little town is on the 13th of July, so will definitely be there. It’s more of a teenage thing, I think. Loud “tektonik” music, flashing lights again… DJ’s and everything! I’m not used to these sorts of things happening so it’s extremely exciting for me when they do :-P.

After being in France for a year, a month and 5 days, I think that I’m finally getting the jest of the language, honestly, the day before yesterday, my mom realised something was wrong with the car engine, and thought it may have been the oil. Then I had a whole, complex conversation, with a French person that we know, about it… In… would you believe it… FRENCH!! :-P

I even surprised myself about how much I could understand… of course there were still those moments of “I-Have-No-Idea-What-You’re-Saying-To-Me-So-I’ll-Just-Smile-And-Nod”… Smiling and nodding doesn’t actually work by the way… Well it never works for me anyway… it’s mainly because of the reason that my body won’t do these movements and prefers to get a rigid look of “Oh-Dear-Gods-Over-Load-Of-Confusion” and I end up with my eyebrows looking all sad and worried, my eyes the size of the moon (I love that song… although Venetia finds it creepy…), my teeth clenched, so the words “Je n’ai pas vraiment saisi ce point” (I didn’t quite catch that), never seem to pass through my lips… No matter how many times I practice it… or the person whom I’m speaking with will just go off speaking at a hundred miles an hour again, and then, I’ll realise, oh well, it couldn’t have been that important… Right? /:(

The absolute worst though, is when you really didn’t understand the person, and then they’ll ask you to translate… Or you happened to be daydreaming for those 5 minutes that you know you REALLY should have been listening, then they’ll look at you, as if expecting a reply, and everything goes silent… This is usually the time to smile and nod, and if that doesn’t work, find something to fixate on, and start talking about that… It usually works, especially if it’s a compliment to the person. **

**If it’s something about the person, try not to fixate too much on it… This will only lead to creeping people out.

Once you really get the hang of all that, it’s usually fine to say that you’re getting the jest of the language… Until once more, you’re asked to translate and you turn to the person closest (the one who’s awaiting the translation of course) and instead of translating you smile and nod and say “I have no idea”… and use your hands as if making some real point. Look back to the French-speaker and then look expectantly, as if, okay now I’m waiting for a response from you.

The best plan though, if you want to practice your French, is simply to tell the French person/ people “Je dois reviser mon Francais” (I must practice my French)… Then begin to ramble on in French, I’ve found that it doesn’t matter what you say, as long as you keep going without a break, for them to respond in French, then it feels like you’re really breezing along in the language.

Although the other day, we were promenading, and walked past one of the lovely neighbours on our street, and my dad said “Bonsoir!”, she beckoned us into her garden, down the back, squeezing past her car, and then to a cherry-filled tree, it had a much larger percentage of cherries on it than our tree did at the time, I’m guessing because my grandmother hadn’t been at that tree yet :-P.

Yes so she told my dad to put the ladder up under the cherry tree and then gave us two shopping bags, and told us to fill them. I thought that we were being extremely intrusive so I just stood there randomly, and then had a conversation with her, of which I decided to do the “I’ll-Be-The-Only-One-Talking” conversation… And so the rambling began… BIG mistake, without thinking I said “Je ne sais pas ce que je dois dire parce que je n’ai pas beaucoup à dire” (I don’t know what I must say because I don’t have very much to say). Afterwards I thought, Oh nooo, how could I say that!!?

So yes, perhaps the rambling French isn’t one of the best ideas… But she didn’t seem offended, and is very nice. I really HAVE to watch more French television, I have a problem with the listening of French, hence, I get overly flustered when people reply :-P.

So that was your “How To Speak French” lesson for today :-P. Now to the poetry!! When I write a poem, I’ll think about a short story, that I know will never be long enough to write as a book, and that I know, if I did make it long enough, I would be far too lazy to write it :-P. So here’s a poem that I wrote in 10 minutes last night.

************************************************
It was a thundering night,
You were quite a sight,
As the doors flew open,
And you made your way in,
You were wearing black and red,
Who knew you would leave so many dead,
You pulled out a gun,
Everyone threw up their hands, as if to a glaring sun,
But nothing we could say would change,
The happenings that had made you go insane,
You came for her, and only her,
As she curled up like a baby on the floor,
You whipped her up, and made her pay,
Who would have though it would be her final day,
Before you pulled the trigger, one last time,
You decided everyone must have done a crime,
The yells and the cries,
How could you have ruined all of those lives,
Finally you turned it on yourself,
You’d never had glory, or even wealth,
She was your life,
Suddenly a wayward wife,
Her fate was sealed,
When she started playing the field.

By Bianca Cassandra P.

************************************************
And another one I wrote a couple of weeks ago, it even has two whole words of French in it!! :-P. Usually I don’t name my poems, but this time I have, because it just goes :-P.

************************************************
Reserved
I’m keeping this place,
I’m keeping this table,
Keeping them for you,
You’ll have a spot,
Always in my heart,
No matter what you do,
Reserving this space,
Expecting your face,
To come smiling around that corner,
Sitting here on my own,
Just another late one?
It’s always what I wonder,
‘Cause you know that my heart is reserved,
Unnaturally curved,
I’ve been waiting so long,
My heart wants a new song,
But even so, still I’m here,
Waiting for you, mon cheri, my dear,
My soul scorns,
My heart burns,
I’ll continue reserving it for you,
Holding my phone,
Expecting you to come,
Every day, this is what I do,
Every day I wait,
Repeating “He’s just late”,
“No, this seat is taken, I’m sorry”,
I’m beginning to worry…
You don’t even know,
Maybe it’ll be easier just to let go
But no,
I’ll reserve this place,
I’ll wait here forever,
Although you’ll know this never.

By Bianca Cassandra P.

************************************************
A couple of weeks ago I drew this tiger, and he’s now one of my favourite art pieces, even if he did only take an hour and a half to draw :-P. And yesterday I also drew a picture of the “Me To You” bears for a friend of mine in Ireland :-), Kirsty!! I think it is the cutest picture ever :-P. Oh I’m so modest ;-).

If you’re new to the site, remember to scroll at the way down to the bottom and click “Older Posts” and keep doing this until you come to the very first “Kiss My Fishy” post. I just realised how long this post is, and that I should really get back to French. Shall post soon! Don’t forget to kiss the fish on your next fishing excursion… And get pictures!! And then send the pictures into me at kissmyfishy@gmail.com :-P.

Hope to hear from you guys soon!

- Bianca

P.S. If you have a short story (a paragraph or two) and want me to write a poem about it, just send it to my e-mail, and I'd be more than happy to :-).

This is NOT summer

2008-06-10T11:29:00.001+02:00

Hey all of my fellow fish kissers!

I can’t say that I have too much news but a couple of things have happened recently.

One of which was my parents buying me an acoustic guitar! It sounds like thunder!! I love it to bits, midnight blue, oooh! Yes, so quite ecstatic about that! Though, the strings on an acoustic guitar are much thicker than that of an electric. So when pressing down on the strings, it is much more difficult, therefore, much more painful!!!

So my finger tips have been toughening up, will have to put some video’s up on “Youtube” of me playing! Ooh, fun ^_^!

Another, oh, so very… exciting thing that happened was that my sister, Gizmo and I all got caught in a thunder and lightning storm when we went for a walk! It wasn’t horrible but it was hardly pleasant as well :-P. We’d gotten quite a bit away, and then drip… drip… then it just began bucketing down! I triiiied to hide under anything suitable and run the rest of the way, to try keep dry, but soon enough, gave up. Gizmo and Venetia were loving it, but I wasn’t so keen :-P. Half way home there were enormously large BOOOOOOM’s!!! Which actually made it fun! Once we got home, I had asthma and we were all saturated. I thought this was supposed to be “sunny” France /: … Pffft!

Yes! This is NOT summer, I woke up on the 1st of June and looked outside, rainy… wet… not as cold as Ireland though. And I can’t really complain, yesterday I got a bit of tanning in!

I had my first French Cinema experience on Sunday! We were wanting to go watch “Indiana Jones” but were a liiiittle bit late in getting to the queue and ended up going to “Cash” instead, it was alright. The funny thing was that after five minutes of French speaking, it burst into English for about ten minutes!! Venetia and I were thinking “Oh no! Our friends are going to think we chose this film because it’s in English”, it was alright though, even though it did keep slipping into English, the majority was French, and it wasn’t too hard to follow along with. The end had a very good twist!

Okay, I’ve decided to do my “100 French Words A Day” thing today, so have to get stuck into that… Joy! ;-)

Hoping to hear from you soon, waiting on photos :-).

- Bianca

Argh, TOO bright!!

2008-05-29T15:12:00.002+02:00

Hey guys!

The ice-rink closed last week, and the weather has been terrible since, so I haven’t much new news. I’m hoping to get out fishing sometime soon, today would have been perfect, but alas, it is Monday :-P.
Sorry guys, I wrote that section on Monday, and then changed over to doing some French :-P… Let me start over :-P.

Yesterday morning my mom came into my room, walked to the windows and threw open the French shutters. The sun streamed through, I moaned and mumbled “Argh, TOO bright!!”…. Then I realised that the weather was finally back to normal! So I flopped out onto the section of bed that had a sun-patch on it, and said “Ooh! Sun! Sun!!!”… Yes, you appreciate it much more once you’re completely awake :-P.

Today my mom and I have been working on flattening out the sand for the pool to be placed on. Oooh yes! Don’t think that I’ve told you, never mind the first problems we had with the pool, a few weeks ago we found out that we had to move the pool off the patio! “Soooommmmebody” (I put this “soooommmebody” into inverted commas because… I honestly don’t know who built it :-P) hadn’t built it correctly… and therefore it wasn’t strong enough :-(…

Anyhow, a few weeks later, three tonnes of sand, a few concrete bricks, a lot of muscle pain from moving the sand, and a lot more water later, we were done! Joy! We just finished it today, and it looks brilliant! So looking forward to going for a dip soon.

I’m truly looking forward to the summer, all of the fruit in the garden will be in bloom, the sun will be on duty 16/7 :-P and of course, the outdoor pool will be open! I think it’s absolutely brilliant, well it looks like it anyway on the website! I’ve wanted to go just to the indoor one recently, but haven’t found myself going :-S. So guess I’ll just wait :-P.

The downside to summer here… and any hot country I guess, is the mozzies! The other night one of the mosquito’s had an all you can eat buffet on my back… and my wrist! Absolutely horrible and itchy! And another problem here are the “aliens”. I have told you about these awful insects that I named “aliens” before (Blog Name -There's an ALIEN in my tea-cup!), we got them in Sicily, and they just can’t seem to leave us alone… well leave my sister alone more like, she’s been “attacked” uncountable times in the past week, one crawling across her arm, another, scurrying up her leg!... Blurgh!

Oh! My grandmother’s come over to stay with us from England, woo! ^_^ She’s not like a normal grandmother… She’s really cool… not that normal grandmother’s aren’t cool, but Karen’s different ^_^. Anyway, I call her “Karen”… I never really got the “Granny” thing. It just sounds strange and makes Karen feel old (which she’s not) :-P. Also with my uncles and aunts, sometimes I guess I’ll say “Uncle Rino”… no, maybe not :-S, :-P.

We have a baguette lady! Can’t get anymore French than that! Yes, so she comes everyday… except Monday /:-S, and delivers our daily “flute”. Like a baguette but larger. It’s pretty darn awesome! And always super fresh and soft! Mmmm!

Ooh! Has anyone watched “Buffy, The Vampire Slayer”? I know it’s a random question, but since we have a shortage of English speaking films in France and there is only so many times that I can watch “Arthur and the Minimoys”, a friend of my dad’s has leant us the complete series of “Buffy” and they’re surprisingly good :-P!

Okay, since I’m telling you about the weather, my grandmother, the baguette lady and… what I’ve been watching on T.V. lately, I think it’s time to stop boring you :-P.

So I shall talk soon, or at least once I have more news :-P.

- Bianca

My first pool… sort of… in France ^_^!

2008-05-01T19:19:00.000+02:00

Hey everyone!

I haven’t got a lot of news… again… except for… that... we got a swimming pool! Yay :-P!! But the bad news is that it’s been terrible weather ever since the day we got the first one… yes, the first one >.<.

You see, the first one was far too big for the patio but we didn’t realise this until it was filling with water and falling over the edge… we had quite a few mud slides… blurgh!! Something I NEVER want to do again… so we got another one, which fits perfectly and is still quite big. Even though the weather’s not been up to par, on the first day of putting up the second pool, I went for an extremely cold dip… I don’t think the point of swimming pools are supposed to be to make you turn pale and numb… it was a lot of fun though! My first pool… sort of… in France ^_^!

A couple of days ago, we went fishing! It was brilliant, even though I didn’t catch anything, it was still a lot of fun :-)! I got to see a few fish… and even saw a tidler swimming away with my bait… well a giant blob of orange moving around under the water for a bit before… vanishing into thin… water :-P. It was quite an excursion, since we don’t live by the lake anymore, we drove out to the small one by the main office area of Le Sidobre. On a day where we have more time, I am determined to get out to the ENORMOUS lake that we found, but that’s an hour and a half drive away /:(.

When we went fishing, Gizmo came along, and only got frustrated towards the end of fishing, beginning to moan and growl at the float… he even tried to get closer to the water, by sliding down a steep rock and luckily being saved by a bed of reeds, which just managed to hold him up from getting wet until I shimmied my way down and pushing him back onto the grass.

Another thing that happened with Gizmo when we went fishing, that was absolutely the funniest thing, I’ve yet to see, was that when we went into Le Sidobre’s tourist office, Gizmo came with quite happily, and ran around, sniffing everything he could, whilst we tried finding directions to the closest place that would sell a fishing license.

The lady there, drew out a whole map, then asked where we’d be fishing, we said right there by the lake for an hour or two, and she folded up the map and told us that it would be fine to fish without the license. So we were content about not having to go driving again. Anyway, I walked out of the open glass door and Gizmo followed beside me to run straight, head first into the closed glass door, it was so funny! I thought that only I did that :-P. After a minute of comforting, Gizmo was running around and tail-wagging again :-).

I haven’t got a lot of news, before being in France for a year I want to be speaking French almost fluently, and that includes understanding it as well! So that gives me… 24 days :-P. I’m getting there, yesterday I watched six episodes of “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” in French with French subtitles, to get my ears tuned in, I’ve already watched the French Sopranos, and now my dad’s friend has lent us all of the Buffy series so… Yes, I just don’t feel like watching them again today, so going to go learn more French words once I finish writing this :-).

In a week it’s my sister’s birthday, she’ll be turning 19!! I can’t believe it :-P. So if you want to send me a picture of you kissing a fish for her birthday, that’d be GRRRRREAT! I’m sure she’d appreciate it ;-)… well I would appreciate it :-P.

Sorry this post wasn’t that long, I shall try writing up soon… once I get some news! See you all soon!

- Bianca

Le Sidobre rocks!!

2008-04-07T11:04:00.002+02:00

Hey everyone!

I’m extremely ecstatic because I received an e-mail, giving me permission to use a photo :-)! So I have to say, thank you very much to the Guth’s at “Guth’s Lodge” in Alaska for the permission! You can find their website here ---> http://www.guthslodge.com/

This lady was one of their guests, and caught the first of many Silvers that day. She grew up in eastern Europe and lives in the Mideast! She sounds like a “Globe Trekker” like myself :-P.

Thanks again for the permission guys :-)!!

Well recently, we’ve had absolutely gorgeous weather here since Friday! Sunday was a little overcast but the weather’s back on track today! On Friday we went about driving, we did actually go out for a purpose but never quite arrived at our destination /:… You see, we set out to go to “Le Sidobre” but ended up driving around and slowly losing ourselves and our time, within quaint, French villages. Le Sidobre is supposedly a large park, like the French version of “Matopas” in Zimbabwe :-P. Basically, gorgeous scenery with large rocks, defining gravity by their awkward shapes and sizes.

We did actually see some of the rocks and boulders, and even found the Le Sidobre Office, so we got so excruciatingly close, but there were no walkways or cycle paths from there, so we’d obviously been in the wrong area. The little sneak-peaks that we did get from there though were absolutely wonderful! In that area there are forests and little streams everywhere! So since we couldn’t find the main section of what we went looking for, we just drove around, stopping every few minutes so that my mom could take pictures for her photography course.

So, all in all, it was a lovely day! Sure we’ll set out to find Le Sidobre, preferably when the offices are open and with a map on another day!

The poll that I put up last week, has only had 1 vote, but it still counts, so countries is what I shall write about!

Okay I juuust wrote this, literally over the past 10 minutes, so I may make some changes to it later, for now though, I hope you enjoy it, it sounds more like it’s about weather but I did try!

************************************************************
It’s strange to think about how different one place is from another,
Some countries you can lie down in the sun, others you must cover!
Languages and nationalities,
Monuments, so much to see!
Some countries are calm and peaceful,
Others have war and are wasteful,
Snow is rare, where I come from,
We only ever get the sun,
But just a few hours up the road,
Where it’s not by the coast,
Up high in the mountains,
You won’t be seeing flowing fountains,
There will be no sunshine,
The weather is not so kind,
On every single thing, there is no colour,
This is where the snow shall smother,
In Ireland forever it rains,
So much, you could go insane!
Winter in France…
It’s usually overcast,
But when the skies are clear,
And the sun appears,
What a sight it is to see,
This will stay the same, no matter where you’re from, every country.

By Bianca Cassandra P.

************************************************************

Oh when we were driving around, we did find some lovely areas to go fishing, and even saw a few people giving it a shot. So that’ll be fun to do, sadly that day, we didn’t have the fishing gear with us /:, so now we’ve decided to always have it in the car :-).

I’m going to leave you guys, as I have to go do my French :-P. Will be posting again soon!

- Bianca

Plonk! Vroosh! Click!

2008-03-18T12:44:00.002+01:00

Hello people!

Sorry that I haven’t written anything for a while, but the truth is that I have absolutely no news whatsoever… how sad >.<.

The good news is that my mom and I went shopping last week and they’re bringing out all of the fishing equipment again! I am really looking forward to that comforting feeling of the fresh outdoors. When I think about the flicking of the wrist and releasing the wire from my grip as it floats seemingly weightless through the air and lands with a soft “Plonk!” and a small splash (hopefully not getting tangled with loose reeds :-P). Then quickly flipping over the metallic piece of the reel in case of that rare occasion that you’ll instantly get a bite. Finally when you do, how the float goes under… or in some cases starts moving around in circles with the smaller brained, dazed fish, who just feels it is safe enough to swim quite naturally with a hook in their lip.

Maybe trying to be cool, thinking it’s an awesome new piercing that came free with the mysterious blob of cheese-like-orange stuff, that just so happened to be floating in their path “Hey dudes, l-hook a’ me!”. Then “Vroosh” they’re gone! Perhaps later they come flying back in… Wow, talk about the scitsofrenic of the day! Fisrt a normal fish, changing into a cool punk, then a vanishing magician, to being a bird… without wings, just beinging thrown back in the general direction of where they came from… or for the more larger, unfortunate fish, meraculously changing into a tasty barbeque… What a day!

Anyway, back to the way we see it! Gloriously relaxing and getting that first tug of the day! Gripping the rod for all it’s worth and putting your complete might into reeling the fishy in. I love it! Not so much though when you get it out of the water, it comes loose and begins to roll down the embankment… this happened to me with what looked like the largest fish that I’ve ever caught, not so surprised that he was too big for the hook, never being caught by anyone and still getting to eat all of our tasty… well rather smelly orange bait. I wouldn’t say that I’m overwhelmed with joy having to touch the fish to get it off the hook though, especially not touching it with my lips :-P.

Well I’ve actually become a lot less squeamish since fishing, when “someone” that I knew, I think they’d prefer if I didn’t name them :-P, caught her first fish she was so upset and yelled for my dad to take it off the hook… when he threw it back, she cried because a scale had come off it… I thought it was rather amusing, but tried my hardest not to show her my thoughts on her squeamish-ness… especially seeing as I refused to put a maggot on the hook earlier on that day :-P…

Yes, so getting back on to the subject of what I was on before I got extremely distracted… Like I was saying, I have no news whatsoever, so I’m going to just write about… well, whatever first pops into my head at this very moment, that seems interesting enough.

Oh! My mom received a camera recently as an “early birthday present”. She’s decided to take up photography so all I’ve been hearing (and seeing) recently, is a faint yet noticeable “Click!” and a flash of light. That lasts just a few seconds but that’s more than enough time to blind someone, trust me! I have had uncountable (155+ :-P) photos taken of me since that thing arrived. Not that I mind of course, unless I’ve only just woken up or am about to go to sleep… Then this is simply impractical and utterly uncomfortable… bright lights are not welcome, during “tired” hours :-P.

Oh! I was just about to forget to put up some more poems, the first one was written in quite a short while actually, the second took longer, which is surprising, since it’s a lot shorter :-P. Okay, I just wrote up both and since I only have one more left decided to just throw it in there as well :-P. Hope you like them, think I’ll put up a poll for you guys to choose what I’ll write my next poem about as well… or you could just post a comment or send me an e-mail about what you want to hear my rhyming thoughts on at kissmyfishy@gmail.com :-).

************************************************************
I saw you that day,
Yet I didn’t know what to say,
I took a deep breathe,
Shut my eyes and turned,
As you came my way,
You just skimmed right by me,
As I watched you walk briskly,
I wondered to myself, could you see?
For I noticed you stop, so very slightly,
A feeling inside, sent me spinning,
So I chased after your footsteps,
I felt like I was in a race, I was the one winning,
As you turned, I was taken aback, breathless, a rush,
For bestowed upon your finger, was the very symbol of trust,
We looked into each others eyes,
I’m sure you could tell I was about to cry,
I believed in love at first sight,
And this felt so strong, even stronger than “might”,
I simply remarked, I’m sorry you’re not the one,
And within an instant, you had nodded, and were gone.

By Bianca Cassandra P.

************************************************************
I sit here all on my own,
Wandering how many days it’s been since you’ve gone,
I watch the moon rise and fall,
Thinking of you, holding back, not wanting to call,
At night I try to fight the tears away,
I would never want you to see me in this way,
What you did that day, no one will ever forget,
You made your poor mother, so very upset,
Pulling the rope, and kicking the chair,
Was there no other way out of here?

By Bianca Cassandra P.

************************************************************
How I wish to be a butterfly,
I say to myself with a sigh,
Able to fly away so easily,
So many different colours, prettier than a bee,
Lifting itself off the ground,
Without a buzz, not a sound,
To be carried away with the air,
Never having a worry or a care,
Even if it only lasts a day,
It must be great, to be free, to play,
From a creepy,
Of a tree,
To an insect of the skies,
Their tiny round eyes,
The delicate dust,
This is definitely a must,
Wings of weightless material,
Then their two, little aerials,
A body so fine,
I want that to be mine!
Six spindly legs,
Skinnier than pegs!
I bet they never thought they’d be able to do this,
To be caught in the winds,
That would be my only wish,
But then I ask myself with glee,
Do they ever wish to be me?

By Bianca Cassandra P.

************************************************************

I thought I’d leave my poems off on a happy note with the butterfly poem. Hope you like them :-)!

Looking forward to hearing from you all soon!

- Bianca

Lions, tigers and bears, oh my!

2008-02-25T12:24:00.011+01:00

Good morning! (Hmm… well I personally find that a contradiction of terms ;-P)

Well, in my last post I offered to draw anything that you wanted if you sent me a picture of you kissing a fish! And there has been… no-one :-P. So I haven’t drawn for a while and since February is quite a short month, you guys only have 4 days until the expiry date expires :-P, so I guess I wont be drawing for another while… I guess I could just come up with something to draw but that’s no fun :-P!

Also in the last post I was telling you guys about the U.S. spy satellite, well, they shot it down over the Pacific Ocean on the night of the total lunar eclipse. Oh! Yes, did anyone get to see the lunar eclipse on Thursday (the 21st)? I was so upset, I was determined to get up at 04:01 (it was going to happen at 03:01-03:51 GMT, we’re an hour ahead) to watch it but my dad got up and it was cloudy :-(, he took some pictures of the clouds though ;-P.

So last weekend we went for a two hour drive, to an “African Safari Reserve”. It was… the COOLEST place… EVER (excluding Disney Land of course :-P). The first part you drive around, rhinos, giraffes and general wildlife, going into ostriches (one attacked my window >.<>

(/:-O This giraffe has a special abilty to walk on walls!! :-P Sorry about that only just realised that it's sideways now /:-(. )

We weren’t allowed to stop when we went through the bears and lions, so we just drove extremely slowly, and also went around the lions twice :-P. The baby bears were the cutest little things, wrestling and playing but the older ones… weren’t too lively :-P. It was an exceptionally beautiful place, really great to see all of the animals have so much freedom and space!

After driving around it became a walk around zoo but when we climbed a path way :-O! The view that uncovered itself was magnificent, it was an outlet from the ocean with hundreds of little pink blobs in it, getting closer you realised that they were flamingos.

(Venetia and I standing in front of the view of the outlet and the ocean beyond. I'm the destructive nuisance breaking all of the rules by sitting on the railings :-P.)

Before we got to the flamingos though, I spotted the cutest little thing and had to get a photo with him… Aww! I named him Rocky… how very original :-P.

We also saw the cutest little baby pot belly pig, he had the funniest of frights from this large, evil one that kept running around and scaring the smaller ones made grunts… aww! And also a joey (a baby kangaroo) come out of it’s mother’s pouch! Now he was cute!

This monkey kept coming over to the window and as soon as we took the picture he would run away and disappear from view so most of the pictures are just of the enclosure half of the time :-P… this is the only non-blurred one that my sister caught, of course when she took another one when the monkey turned to look at us this is how it turned out :-P.
Of course, most of the pictures of me there aren’t so great, since someone, not looking at anyone in particular (Mom) rudely awoke me at 07:47… well I was actually woken gently and handed a cup of tea :-P… but this doesn’t take away from the matter that I was woken at… THAT time :-P… I do appreciate my weekend sleep-ins :-P. Of course it was well worth getting up that early, it does take a good few hours to make your way through that park. If you happen to ever go, the website says that you can’t bring a dog with you… it lies!! Once you get there, you’re allowed to bring your dog every where except into the goat pen… well no, duh :-P! So Gizmo, was left at home all day :-(.

I was really looking forward to the goat pen actually, I just love those creatures, but once we finally reached it, I was slightly put off by the ages of the kids (HA! Kids! Like baby goats… but I was literally referring to the children) in the pen with the goats… yes, I’ve long surpassed that age :-P. So I just watched from a distance… envious :-P.

(This is the type of camel that I rode in Tunisia, the dromedary camel.)

I’ve recently started doing Tai Qi (also spelt Tai Chi, I believe). It feels like I’ve been doing it forever, 4 days in a row is quite a feat for me… especially getting up and doing it on a Sunday, wow! Yes, this morning I woke up and was in terrible muscular pain… but after doing another half hour of Tai Qi, I’d quickly forgotten about the pain. It’s extremely relaxing, you feel as if you’re a floating cloud when you’re finished… but this, of course, does not mean that you can actually levitate :-P. And the muscles I’ve got now! Oooh, don’t mess with me :-P!

Oh a few days ago I decided to do a little bit of poetry writing. I ended up writing three but I don’t want to bore you so I’ll only post one or two up… Oh okay! I’ll post up a gaming poem that I wrote the other day and a war poem that I wrote a little while back, you’ll eventually get to hear… or read all of my poems, I’ll just have to try to remember to post them up every time I post up… a post… /:-S Serious over load on the word “post”… Post, post, post! I’m so sorry, but I had to, it was so tempting :-P.

*************************************************
As I stared across that silent hill,
I wondered how many more they’d kill,
I couldn’t even guess how many were dead,
These great men of my country had fought and bled,
Among them I knew my father lay,
What would my mother have to say?
As I turned the lifeless bodies over,
Stripped of their weapons and their cover,
I asked myself will this ever go away?
No, this is simply a game that they like to play.

By Bianca Cassandra P. (Me… who knew, huh? :-P)

*************************************************
I’ve always wanted to hear those whispers and secrets,
The sniggers and giggles,
And yet I just can’t seem to mingle,
I share my life with the “count-down box”,
Same place, all day,
I sit here and play,
Wasting my life away,
As my time crumbles,
I just can’t seem to stop hitting “stumble”,
It’s clearly a disease,
As I slowly gain weight,
And live in a state,
Old dishes piling up,
Sticky coffee cups!
I can’t sleep, or work,
What’s the point in making friends?
They’re all just jerks,
No! I yell out in despair, that stupid bugger!
How could he dare?! I hit the keyboards and whack the screen,
I can’t believe this has happened to me again,
He’s slain me for the last time!
A level 70 elite?! That should be a crime!
I can’t take any more, I’ve become such a bore!
I delete my characters, erase my account,
I clean my house, shower and shave,
But then I realise, oh no! I did not save!
As I walk slowly to the computer,
I fight back, go outside and make a vow,
That I shall make friends, this is now the very end.

By Bianca Cassandra P. (Me again :-P)

*************************************************

If you’ve ever played World of Warcraft or used Stumble Upon, you’ll be able to relate to the latter poem completely, because of how addictive they can be :-P.

Okay I’ll leave it at that, and I’m hoping to hear from you all soon!

- Bianca

VROOOOOSH!

2008-02-06T14:32:00.001+01:00

Hey guys,

Not too much news so I’ll just tell you about some other things, since I seem to be very good at that :-P. Well like I said in the first post, I’ve been learning Pink Floyd’s, Wish you were here. Now, I can actually play it :-). Still having some slight difficulty with strumming and singing at the same time… but now I’m … trying… emphasis on the “trying” :-P, to learn Guns N Roses, Sweet Child O’ Mine… Since yesterday I have the introduction. Will get stuck into it later on again.

I don’t know if I’ve ever told you but in the first few weeks of living in France, without the internet, I was driven (by boredom) to try out drawing. I absolutely love it… mainly because I found out that I’m pretty good, well much better than I was when I was 9 anyway :-P. I’ll put some pictures of my art work (that sounds so snazzy :-P) up for you all to see. I noticed that there’s been quite a few posts and not one picture, and I know how much it sucks looking at a page without any pictures, so will change that :-P.

(Tiger Pinting I drew for my dad's birthday a few years ago.)

My best drawings (in my opinion) are the “My Chemical Romance” ones. MCR is my favourite band so I took some cool images from their cover and draw them… but BIGGER :-P! There’s also some pretty flowers… an ice-skate… a lizard and other things… just really random. I don’t have a specific style. Oh also a shoe :-P… wow! :-P

Oh I know! If you send me a picture of you kissing a fish then you can (if you want to, of course) ask me to draw anything you like… although 20 years down the line I don’t want to be receiving e-mails, well I do want to be receiving e-mails :-P, just not telling me what to draw, when all of my drawing is out of me… if you get my drift :-P … so this has to have an expiry date :-P. I say until the 1st of March 2008. You have just under a month to get those fishing pictures in :-P! If I get no e-mails during that time… I’ll just extend the dead-line a little bit since I’m forever running out of ideas of what to draw :-P.

I’m addicted to hot chocolate… yes, random O.o I know, but not really for me, since I’m drinking it right now… Mmm. I’m also addicted to Tabasco sauce… but haven’t had it recently because you have to go to specific shops in France to get it.

Oh! I was just sitting here, thinking of what I could tell you next… I saw A METIORITE!!! It was so awesome, and really random timing. I was playing on my computer and then decided to close the French shutters since it was beginning to get dark. So I started at my sisters window… and then as I was pulling the second one shut… VROOOOOSH! I didn’t actually hear anything, but you can imagine that it would have sounded like that!

It wasn’t that big but it was colourful, I would say that it was falling pretty close, but it was probably a few miles back. Then POP it vanished into the darkness of the sky! Yes, I know, it burned up but it’s nice to put a little bit of a story to some things at times :-P. So like I was saying POP… and it was gone… never to be seen again! How dramatic :-P.

When I think about it though, it wasn’t really “random” timing, since (I believe this is correct but not 100% sure about it) because a meteorite falls to earth every 0.5 seconds.

Oh! I saw on “Yahoo! News” that a SPY satellite is falling to earth at this very moment! Last time I checked it was 173 miles away, falling 1,640 feet every day, but it’ll only be visible with the naked eye when it enters the atmosphere at 59 miles high, it’ll crash down to earth 30 minutes later (this is supposed to be happening late February, to early March 2008). They have absolutely no control of it, therefore, they don’t know where it’s going to land. When they sent it up, it stopped working almost immediately, but it has “information” on it… and it’s roughly 13 to 16.5 feet long! I’m personally not going to worry about it since we have far less chance of being hit by it than being struck by lightning and earth is 75% water. Just some interesting little facts :-P. As you can tell this website is clearly not all about fishing :-P.

Right, I’m going to leave it at that and hope to hear from you all soon!

- Bianca

It’s all my electric guitar’s fault!

2008-01-24T11:43:00.000+01:00

Hey everyone!

I know it’s been a while, but you can’t blame me :-P! It’s all my electric guitar’s fault! No really, since Christmas (when I got it) I haven’t been able to put it down… no it’s not a “Oh no I’ve been playing with the super glue again” situation :-P. It’s just so satisfactory learning a new song and it coming out correctly. This is my second electric guitar, I got my first one last Christmas but then less than a month later we decided to move to Sicily, so I had to get rid of it :-(.

I didn’t really play it much in Ireland anyway, my guess is because we had English T.V. … ah Sky+ I miss you so very much :-P. It’s amazing how you can pick up the slightest sound of English on the television here, even though it’s turned right down and there’s a loud French person dubbed over it :-P.

Back to the guitar! Ahh, my gorgeous guitar! Ever since I was five or six… or even before then, I’ve wanted to be a singer, the only problem is, I’m a lot more shy to sing in front of people now than I was then :-P. Acting’s also been a common “Oh! I want to be an actress some day” phrase from me :-P. Anyway, how we got to this subject, I have no idea, but if you just so happen to be someone who has a part for me in a movie, I’m sitting right here… hint, hint, nudge, nudge, wink, wink! :-P

Anyway back onto a more realistic subject :-P. Yes, my guitar playing’s going great, so far (remember this is less than a month people!... Okay, okay! It’ll be a month tomorrow… still!) I can play a nice Spanish piece, the “basic” strumming to “Wild Thing” and what is apparently “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” (It doesn’t really sound like it, when I play anyway, but it’s still pretty!).

Also a really nice song that I heard on the end of “The Sopranos”, Kasey Chamber’s “The Captain”. Oh and another, promise this is the last… for NOW! Mwa ha ha ha ha!!!... Ehem hem… I.. I mean, yes so I’m also learning “Wish you were here” by Pink Floyd ^.^!

I’m even writing my own song, well, all that I’ve got so far is the guitar part… not so much the words… think that I’ve done it in the wrong order but oh well, I’ll get there… eventually :-P. Once I’m good enough at Pink Floyd or even my own song, I’ll be sure to “You tube” it and post it up here :-)!

Not really much other news, as you can see by my enthusiasm over the guitar, I don’t get out much… Oh wait! Not true! I have got more news (The “I don’t get out much…” is still true though). You’re all condemned to this torture for just a little longer :-P.

I think that it was two weeks ago, that we decided to take a drive up to Toulouse because there was supposed to be an enormous ice-rink placed in the main square for the winter months. When we got there, the place was crowded, and the rink… well it wasn’t as large as I had pictured it.

It was a great outing though, we got to see some figure skating shows in the interval, but decided to pack up and start heading back home when we saw the queues and felt the cold. As well as that was that you got little coloured slips of paper so you might have to wait 45 minutes until your 45 minute session. If you do ever come to France, Toulouse is definitely a “must” though, it’s gorgeous towering buildings with its stylish shops, but I recommend going on a warm day… Heehee, just read over that and realised that I sound like a travel agent :-P.

Well, I reckon I’ll leave it at that. If you feel like surprising me on my birthday, I’d appreciate “Kiss My Fishy” pictures :-P… just a hint, *Insert creepishly ghost like voice here* Remember the 1st of February, February, February, February (no that wasn’t my “I repeat myself symptom”… it was supposed to sound like it was fading away… or an echo… whatever the likeliness of ghosts do anyway :-P. If that wasn’t clear and now you’re sitting there utterly confused, my birthday is on the 1st of February and I wouldn’t mind pictures of you guys kissing fish… I really should of just said that in the first place :-P.

Oh another reminder is just to remember (if you are new to this blog or have lost me on the reason that I would like pictures of people around the world kissing fish) that the blog actually starts a few pages down, this is my most recent, if you scroll to the bottom, there’s a button that says “Older Posts”, click this, scroll down the next page, click it again, etc. until you find yourself on the very first post. This should be pretty clear since there’s pictures of, yes, you’ve guessed it, me kissing a fish… how lovely… :-P.

Right, I’ll write up again soon… or in a while, depends on how my guitar-ing goes :-P.

- Bianca

I can't believe it's not... turkey....?!

2008-01-01T14:42:00.000+01:00

Hey Everyone!

I know I haven’t written in a while, so just going to post a quick one now. Nothing much has really been going on here. I’m getting better at ice-skating though =)! France is gorgeous, even though today’s the 1st of January, it’s so sunny outside! With saying that it’s the 1st, Happy New Year!!! I didn’t really think to post something up for Christmas… mainly because… well it was Christmas and I had my mind on other things :-P.

This Christmas was very quiet. Usually we’d have a lot of people over but with living in France and all… well everyone is still in Ireland. It was quite strange actually, not the fact that it was quiet more that French stores don’t supply many things… or at least not where we were looking anyway.

For instance, you can’t get “Lyle’s Golden Syrup”… an extremely important ingredient for FUDGE! So my sister can only make it when someone from her work goes over to England and brings her some back :-P. Another necessity is “Bovril” that you also can’t get in France. I was so annoyed, it’s like marmite, but in my opinion much nicer :-P! Anyway, the Christmas things that we were having trouble getting a hold of were “Crackers” (not the one’s that you put cheese on, the ones that make a … BANG, when you pull on them :-P... wow I wouldn’t be such a great describing person if you guys were aliens and hadn’t ever heard of anything :-P).

Another difficulty to get was “candy canes”, we couldn’t find them anywhere! On Christmas Eve, I think it was, my parents came home and had found some =). So that was great, but they’re not really like the green, red and white, mint flavoured candy canes that you can get. These are more multi-coloured and fruity flavoured :-P. They still look awesome though :-P!

Oh and also most of the ingredients to bake a proper Christmas cake, my mom makes a few every year. It’s the only thing that I’ll eat that has raisins in it… I’m just not much of a raisins fan. Anyway, this year we didn’t have that, but my gran’s supposed to be bringing the things with her when she comes from Ireland =)! Woo! Oh, I also eat mince pies, but what do you know! None of those here either! It’s alright though, ice-cream kept me going for pudding :-P!

Yes another thing that happened at Christmas, and was a consequence of living in France was that we didn’t get Turkey! Well we thought we did, until Boxing Day… You see, we went to the butcher, and we asked the guy for “dinde” (turkey in French). He sent us down to a section but it was just pieces of it, not the whole bird.

Anyway, we came back up and I asked “Avez-vous le ouiseau pour Noel” (literally, have you got the Christmas bird?”. The woman butcher pointed in front of her to a large bird but it had “chapon” stuck to the front of it, my mom and I chose this one, brought it home and then on Christmas it was cooked. It was absolutely lovely, the next day though we found out that, yes dinde is turkey and chapon is actually rooster… Hmmm, who knew?

Anyway I’m going to leave it at that, sorry it’s been a while and this is sort of short! Hope to hear from you all soon!

- Bianca

I don't believe in the moon...

2007-11-28T12:07:00.001+01:00

Hey everyone!

I reckon this post’s just going to be random, so sorry if you get lost along the way ;-P! Outside this morning it was absolutely gorgeous, sparkling frost was covering absolutely everything, yet their wasn’t a cloud in the flawless blue sky! Even the moon was still awake :-P.

In the last house, I was making tea or something in the kitchen and it was about nine or ten at night. We’d just come back from fishing and usually the moon would’ve broken through the horizon already. I thought it was just cloudy and we couldn’t see it, even though you could see every single little star twinkling… well anyway so I looked out the front window and over the hill was like a golden, orange ball. Well literally like the sun coming up but just without the rays and not so blinding. It was absolutely stunning, I called everyone outside and we watched it come up for half an hour or so.

It was moving so fast, well it looked pretty slow, but if you think about it, it would have been going fast ;-P. We did take pictures but they just didn’t do it any justice. None of us wanted to go get the camera because we knew that if we went when we came back it’d be already high in the sky by then. Anyway it was moving so fast that if you just stared at it, it looked like it was on a string that someone was playing with a cat with. It just kept bouncing… I thought it was my eyes and it really started to bother me but then Venetia blurted out, “Hey is it bouncing?!”. So it must have just been an illusion.

Then again, I myself, don’t believe in the moon ;-P. What?! You don’t believe in the MOON?! Yeah, heehee. I know it’s real but I like to speculate sometimes. For instance, you know those videos where the astronaut is bouncing along the surface of the moon and have you ever watched the dirt? It gets kicked up and then pulled straight back down again! I know, I know but just let me have my rant!

When it was coming over the hill it looked like if you were there you’d be able to grab onto it or bite a chunk out of it! :-O I just figured it out! It’s not meteorites that made the craters! It was people who kept eating chunks as it came came up to begin a new night! Like for instance another thing is that why it appears so big in some countries for instance in Zimbabwe, but in Ireland it was just like… okay well the view of the moon from Zimbabwe is like a GIANT circle of cheese, like Brie. Irelands was simply a Babybel… without the wax skin ;-P!

Flip, the French culture is contagious! Look at me, comparing the moon to different chesses and now I’m almost always saying “oh la la”! ;-P

The only problem with saying “oh la la” is that I get a fit of giggles when I do. You see “oh la la” can be used in a lot of situations. For instance when someone dyes their hair pink or gets their hair cut incorrectly you can say it. Or if something really good happens you can also say it as well… The only time that I actually remember hearing anyone using it here so far… and this is where the giggles comes into it… it was when “insert someone else’s name here, so that I don’t embarrass the person who” fell on the ice last week.

The stupid toe pick (for all of you who are now pulling confused faced, that’s the spiky piece on the front) of the figure skates, got caught in the ice, “NAME” went flying and landing on her stomach, thumb twisted… Anyhow as this happened someone from behind (who obviously watched the whole scene happen), yelled out an extremely pained… dog-like-howling-cat-like-dying “OH LA LA!”… I couldn’t laugh at the time, but later on I relived the moment for “NAME” with the “OH LA LA!” included. Now I can’t get it out of my head every time that I say it. It was extremely funny!

I haven’t ever really fallen hard on the ice… my sister did once in Ireland though, it was the same toe pick situation but Venetia landed on her head! I’ve told them all a million times before that an ice-rink is used for ice-skating not flying! My mom, uncle and I were eating at the time in the restaurant right next to the ice-rink. You could ever watch the people skating, that’s how close we were ;-P.

So the signal went off that someone had fallen and through the mass of people my mom saw the blonde hair on the ground and ran to Venetia. She was rushed to hospital and Rino (my uncle) and I followed in his car. Once I knew that Venetia was fine, I was really annoyed with her because she made me leave my slush-puppy behind! I was only eight or nine so you can’t blame me! The next time we went though I got me another one so all was forgiven!

Another situation with Venetia landing on her head… well there’s loads but on her 16th birthday she went horse-riding on a beach. I’m sure you can all see the image here… The horse just went into full throttle, then stopped suddenly, throwing Venetia forward and into the sand. My dad and I were waiting for them to come back at the trekking place when we got the phone call and quickly rushed to her. By the time we got there the ambulance still hadn’t arrived and Venetia was just lying there in the sand squidging it between her fingers and then wanting to hold my hand… eww! Of course I did though ;-P.

She was put into a stretcher and later released out of hospital. I haven’t really fallen on my head or anything… that I can remember anyway ;-P. When I was three though and we’d just moved to Ireland, Venetia and I were playing hide and go seek… or something like that. I was standing behind the door, notice my lace or something on my shoe bent down to fix it, my right hand in the hinge part of the door, holding me up. Then SLAM! Venetia hadn’t noticed me… and had slammed the door shut… hence the SLAM ;-P. I can’t really remember much from here… but what happened was that top piece (half way through my nail) of my forth finger (the one next to the baby finger), had been decapitated!

My mom quickly came running, now this is where my memory comes back, yelled for a cloth or towel. Grabbed my finger… and the piece that was just hanging there by a piece of skin and literally held it together… I know, eww! Someone phoned the ambulance and when they came they were absolutely amazing. My finger had literally sewn itself back together… they put a splint on it and now my finger’s like all of my other one’s ;P. It’s just has a scar (and I reckon it’s slightly off to the one side) but other than that it’s great ;-P.

Oh another incident that happened to me was when I was six or seven in the primary school playground. My friend Lauren and I were playing chases but on a slight kerb. She was ahead of me and I was “it”. So when I fell, of course she didn’t believe me ;-P. She quickly realised after a few seconds and when I began crying. I guess it was sort of wet so we shouldn’t have really been playing chases, but Ireland was always wet so we were used to it ;-P. Anyway Lauren quickly ran and got the playground monitor, then helped me inside the classroom. After lunch we told the teacher who was just a learning one. Our real teacher was in the classroom but wouldn’t talk to us, we had to go ask Miss Robinson instead. Of course, I’m sure she would’ve talked to us if we’d just said that I’d hurt my ankle… she was the first aid teacher as well… but I was sort of afraid of her so we didn’t :-P.

Miss Robinson, just said oh I’d be fine and to just sit down. That day my mom came and picked me up, and we walked home which was a good mile or so. Once we got there I took of my school sock, showed my mom the giant ping pong ball sized ankle and she felt so terrible for making me walk, not that I complained or anything. So anyway she took me to hospital and apparently I’d fractured my ankle, I had to get a cast (I could choose between pink or blue… of course I chose pink ;-P) and I also got to take three days off school to rest it at home. So the three days later when Miss Robinson saw me in my cast I’m sure she felt bad enough for telling me to just sit down.

Not much else has really happened to me… I took a chunk of meat out of my baby finger when I lifted a knife wrong last year, it was really weird… Once I saw the blood, I began panicking, ran into my mom and she just did the same thing that she had done with… the top of my finger. After a while, I realised it wasn’t even painful and felt really silly for panicking.

Another time, was when I was baking a chocolate cake last year… I touched the oven accidentally, looked at my hand melting for a few seconds and then I realised the pain, ran to the sink and let the cold water take care of it.

Well I think you guys have heard enough about my accidents now… ;-P! Hope to hear from you all soon.

- Bianca

I got ATTACKED!!!

2007-11-27T11:55:00.000+01:00

Hey all!

See I told you I’d try writing more this week! I reckon this is just going to be pretty random, but random’s always best :-P!

Well in the first French house, Gizmo made quite a few local friends… or at least he had some fun with them anyway… I wouldn’t quite call it friendly. Since we’d moved into that house at the beginning of summer, if you walked through the grass, literally hundreds of baby grasshoppers would jump around your feet.

I loved it… Gizmo was more for chasing them. It was really funny! Usually though he’d actually catch one in his mouth, spit it out, watch it jump for a while and then catch it again… he did this until the grasshopper made it back to the grass and then he’d find another one, it was hilarious when he lost one though, he’d just make his head go around in circles mainly looking up at the sky… :-P.

Gizmo had an incident at that last house though, I almost had a heart attack when I saw him! Remember that large concrete type thing I’d told you about on the blog “Snakes On A Path... Get it?... Like the movie! Never mind :-P” that I’d picked up to bring to my dad? Yeah, well later on I found out how heavy it really was, I just couldn’t seem to lift it anymore and I also found out that it had a hornets’ nest inside it!

Next time I think I’ll check! I found these things out when I let Gizmo out one day, went back inside to make tea, came back to the door to check on him and this is where I almost had a heart attack! He must had peed on the nest or something but the hornets weren’t happy and there were more than a dozen swooping around him so I ran outside, squealed at Gizmo to get inside, he ran with these things chasing him, I got inside first and once he was in, slammed the door shut… well it seemed a lot more action packed at the time!

This explained something that happened to me when I was standing around about there a week or two earlier… I can’t really remember what I was doing, but whilst I was in the middle of doing it I got ATTACKED!!! Well something stung my hand, I looked down and just got to see a blur of yellow and black through my tear filled eyes. I just had to glance and then began running to the door.

Once I was inside and settled down I noticed that I wasn’t wearing my sister’s flip-flops anymore, which were far too big for me. My mom and sister looked outside and yes, there were the shoes, one, a foot from where I got stung the other one was lying upside-down by the door. They must have flown off me whilst I was running, it was really funny!

Oh yeah another one of Gizmo’s “mouthfuls” was a fully grown lizard! I had found it in a plastic bucket sort of thing that I’d used for fishing the night before. I left it outside and the next day when I went to lift it… yes another “almost heart attack”, no really, I thought it was a snake, but then realised it had legs…

The poor thing must have got stuck and it was boiling temperatures that day, so my mom let it out by the grass and of course Gizmo decided to trot by and have a little look. The lizard didn’t really move but once it got it’s bearings it began to skulk away… this is where the chase began. Gizmo started moved toward it and so the lizard ran away faster. Eventually though, Gizmo actually caught it and then wouldn’t drop it! After a loud “Gizmo! Drop it now!” the lizard quickly got some time to escape and was off into the grass.

We saw a lot of animals in that house, another was this little baby rabbit that my dad noticed out the bathroom window. My dad quickly woke us up to come see, but then it hopped away, the next day though he was there again and we got there soon enough. Aww! Now he was cute! Later my sister and I left out some lettuce for it by the burrow that lead into the barn that it was always by, the next day it had been nibbled on, so that was nice to see.

I don’t think that I’ll be going ice-skating tomorrow with my mom. Last week she fell and hurt her thumb, I also think that my feet need to have a little bit more of recovery time. The back of them are absolutely killing me! Even when I just wear normal shoes, and I have a lot of healing blisters ;-P… insert extremely long, drawn out, sarcastic “lovely” here :-P!

So might do something different, I vote for clothes shopping! Woo ;-P! On Saturday when we were getting ready to leave the ice-rink, Venetia handed me her gloves and the mobile. I know I was carrying them but then I must have set them down, because once we got home, Venetia had a moaning attack about how I’d had the mobile last, of course I agreed and yet she still kept moaning… *rolls eyes* sisters!

No, it was okay though, they’d phoned my dad and said that they were holding it for us and we could collect it when the ice-rink was open tomorrow (which was Sunday). So on Sunday off we went, to my surprise it was absolutely jam packed! The queue was from the register all the way to the door (I know you can’t see how long this is but on Saturday usually there’s no queue or at the most three people)! Now if I’d known this I would’ve preferred to go on Sunday… but I’m not too sure if I like loads of people. So this weekend (if my feet are up for it) I’m going on Saturday and Sunday ;-P.

Okay I think that I’m going to leave it at that. I have to go do some other work now… Hope to hear from you all soon!

- Bianca

He bit me!

2007-11-26T12:08:00.000+01:00

Hey everyone!

I know it’s been a while since I last wrote, okay about 3 weeks (I’m really sorry I didn’t realise it’d been so long!)… and I have no excuse :-P. But since I’ve been going ice-skating I’ve been meeting French people so I’ve been whiling away my week days by learning French. I know a lot of words, thousands, it’s just the difficulty I’m having with understanding everyone!

I think it’s the speed they can talk at or the accent because I can understand my dad perfectly when he speaks French to me… then again it could be because my dad and I know generally about the same amount of words so we know each others limits on the language :-P.

So back to posting properly now :-P. I will try write more this week, but I just can’t really see much point in it since I’m having no responses /:- … Aww well it’ll do for my own reference. You know you guys just don’t have to kiss a real fish I’ll also be pleased with… Okay for instance my dad’s friend is going to go kiss Belfast’s Blue Fish for me and take a picture when he has the time to do it. It’s a giant sculpture of a mosaic sort of fish in… would you ever guess, Belfast :-P! I’ll put an image up of it.

Now back to blogging, I last left off on my story of how I became to be in this exact place in south west France where we’d just moved into our first, temporary house in France. Yes it had a lot of downsides but also nice upsides too. The landlady was… well she was very nice, but not so organised with things. A few weeks before we were going to move she decided to get some builders to make the windows in the house double-glazing. Now first off it was summer time so what exactly was the point of double-glazing now and secondly why choose now when we were just going to move out before winter and she could have had them do it then!

They didn’t even finish the job and so for a week Venetia and I were left windowless, thank goodness for French shutters :-P! Eventually though they did finish it but a week later we moved :-P.

On the 26th of August it was my dad’s birthday. We just had a lazy day but went for a walk later on in the evening. We said hi to Billy the Billy goat, oh yes, back to how original my naming system is :-P. Billy was very sweet, he lived in the sanctuary close by and you could see him when you walked along the road, he’d come running over and if you went to scratch him he would push his head against the bars so that you could get to him! Gizmo wasn’t much of a fan of Billy. Every time we put Gizmo on the wall to see him, Billy would bash the bars and give Gizmo a heart-attack.

This particular evening a guy was feeding Billy some berries in his little area and so he came over and spoke to us (the guy, not Billy :-P)… yes, of course in French. Apparently though Billy is actually called Michel, meh I still prefer Billy :-P.

The guy asked us if we wanted to have a look around and of course we accepted. He introduced us to his wife and began the tour, their property was absolutely gorgeous. They had horses and cats and dogs and goats and donkeys and Shetland ponies and pigs and even an African grey Parrot (my all-time favourite bird that I’ve wanted since we had to leave Nando (my first parrot) behind in South Africa when we moved to Ireland). Nando was a green ring neck though and he’d just began talking as well :-(! The picture below is of me when I was two years old with Nando at our property in Zimbabwe.
So anyway they showed us around and then brought us into Billy’s little area… he began to bite my jeans and head butt me. The guy said he was just playing and wanted me to push him away. It was really funny, when I did Billy stood up on his hind legs, acted as if he was about to ram me and then just fell back down again. The pig was sleeping under a pile of hay so I only really saw one of his ears that was sticking out and nothing more…

The horse stables were built into their house, like they had the stables that if you went up a few stairs there was a dining room and then up more stairs was a door to the rest of their house. At the stable area they let out an absolute monster of a horse, I mean he was extremely stunning, he had a platinum mane and a dark golden body but was far too big for my liking to be around. What made it worse was that he just wouldn’t go back in, so I kept my distance until he was safely locked up again :-P.

When we were in the field with two black horses outside, a cat wandered up and the woman began telling us how the cat loved to come here and rub herself up against the horses legs… crazy cat I’d say :-P but they were very friendly horses, that liked to sneeze, maybe they have cat allergies like me :-P.

Oh! A cat adopted my sister and I the other day when we were taking Gizmo for a walk. She appeared out of nowhere and then just began to follow us. After two minutes we played with her for a while with a piece of grass and then kept on walking. She kept following us then began climbing the neighbour’s rocks so we brought Gizmo inside, I went out the back and called “Ici, chat, chat, chat! Ici chat, chat, chat!” (Here kitty, kitty, kitty! Here kitty, kitty, kitty :-P) just incase it wasn’t obvious :-P. I made a few cat noises and she came running, we played with her in the garden for an hour or so, she even spotted a little red squirrel in the tree, so that was nice to see.

Later on we went walked her back to the road she’d followed us on, and went back inside. Later that night though when I let Gizmo out, guess who was waiting there! Yes, the cat. So we let her in, she wandered around for a bit and the was off again.

An hour or so later she came in through the basement window! So we gave her some milk, let Gizmo downstairs, which was actually really funny! Gizmo has this thing about toilet roll tubes… and socks… but anyway I threw one for him when he was downstairs and because the cat was there and he wanted to show off he fetched it looked to see if she was watching, brought it back and did it quite a few times. Usually he would just run off and hide :-P.

Anyway after a while of playing like this the cat began stalking him so he began stalking her, they went around in a circle watching each other for a few minutes and then she decided she’d had enough and began looking up at the windows so we let her out but haven’t seen her since :-(
I’m sure she’ll be around though, she was absolutely gorgeous like honey coloured. The only problem is though that I have allergies and the whole night I couldn’t sleep properly because I couldn’t breathe and I didn’t even touch her!

Oh right, back to the sanctuary place :-P. Yes, so it was very nice of them to just let us in and have a look around. We said our goodbyes and then were off home again. To be moving into the new house the next week :-)! I’m going to leave it at that… back to French now!

Hoping to hear from you all soon!!!

- Bianca

Ice-skating!

2007-11-15T11:02:00.001+01:00

Hey everyone!

I know I haven’t written anything lately, but it’s because I’ve been busy learning French and …. ICE-SKATING! I absolutely love it! On Saturday we went to the one in my little town for the first time mainly because we couldn’t find it and it had been closed the for summer months.

The first time we got there we were a bit too early so went driving for half and hour and then came back. At 13:30 it was time to go. We didn’t really know what to do, since the only time any of us had been ice-skating in France was in Disney Land’s outside ice-rink.

So anyway I went up to the woman behind the counter said “Patinoire?”. She replied “Oui, oui pour deux?”. Once we got our tickets we walked around to the doors, there was one of those twirling barriers that you walk though and it clicks, so like you would Venetia just walked into it… yeah, you actually had to click this button before so it would unlock. Venetia quickly clicked it and off she went. Once we were in we asked the two girls in there what to do, they pointed and we sort of got the jest.

After a while of unstable-ised walking we finally got used to them opened the swinging door and were met by the freezing temperature inside and the empty atmosphere. There was absolutely no-one there yet. This wasn’t a bad thing, it meant that we could skate and get our bearings before anyone else came out. I was actually extremely surprised! The last time I’d been on ice was nine months ago in Ireland, saying good bye to my friends. But I just got on the ice and went.

More people came and by the end of the day there were at least 40 :P. Big difference to the amount of people there would have been in Dun Donald Ice-Bowl. It was the ice-rink in Belfast. Like you’d get there and there’d be literally hundreds of people crowded the rink!

The best part was that at 15:40 there was a LOUD siren and the shutters began to come down over the large windows, then loud “electro” (rave) music began to play and the disco lights came on. Lots of fun! About 20-30 minutes later though, the shutters came up again and the lights switched back to normal. I was like Aww!

It’s okay half an hour or so later it happened again :-D. In Dun Donald it stayed with the lights and the rave music the whole time. We skated for four hours straight, I only fell once :-)! It wasn’t really like falling, Venetia was pushing me from behind then I skidded but quickly lifted myself up again :-P.

Once the session was over, we got off the ice, wobbling because of the numbness and because of how painful our muscles were! We changed back into our shoes, had some difficulty walking, and then went home. It was so nice to sit down! For three whole days I was in severe pain with my legs and arms. Guess I’m not used to doing so much exercise :-P. On the third day I thought it would be so much better but it was worse! I literally just flopped out of bed.

On Tuesday, I was much better and so my mom and I decided to go ice-skating! Wooo! We went to the place, but we were an hour early, so we went shopping, came back and then it was still closed! I looked at the large time-table again and realised I had been looking at the wrong day! The patinoire (ice-rink) was only open three days a week, Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday. Wednesday does seem like a pretty random day but in France, schools finish early and primary schools don’t even go on a Wednesday. So we reluctantly went home but decided that we’d come back the next day.

Yes, so yesterday we got there at 13:30, skated for three hours, went shopping and then picked my sister up from work. It was loads of fun, despite the fact that I fell three times. The first time I fell it was because I was trying to show my mom something :-P.

The other two times were near the end and were very painful! I hurt my knee, elbow and my side. I actually grazed my elbow and just sat where I fell and said “… Ow”. Really funny after the pain had gone away….

Last night I couldn’t even sleep on my side! I also fell on my hands, so that was very sore with them being numb from the cold already! Other than that I had an awesome day! My mom’s figure skates were sticking into her toe so we asked if we could change them and the guy said we could use the hockey skates if we wanted. We did! It was so much easier, for the first 10 minutes or so it felt very slippery but I got the hang of them.

I can even do the leg movements like a continuous figure eight, the snake, turn and skate on one foot and do a stop on my right heel whilst gliding on my left foot. So I’ve made up my mind about which ice-skates I want to get, just for recreational “go-around-the-rink” ice-skating. Hockey skates! :-P

Pity Venetia didn’t get to try them out but I’ll just ask if we can use them this Saturday again. Oh! We also found out how to use the lockers! It’s all electronical and the instructions were easy enough to follow except for one that I couldn’t understand. We just got the guy to come and show us :-). So now I know :-P.

Really looking forward to Saturday, Venetia’s going to teach me how to skate backwards and do a T stop :-). So I’ll tell you how that goes and I’ll also try and get some pictures or even recordings for you.

I think that I’ll leave it at that but if anyone has any ice-skating tips please e-mail them to me at kissmyfishy@gmail.com, and I’m still waiting on those photos :-P.

Hope to hear from you all soon!

- Bianca

Snakes On A Path... Get it?... Like the movie! Never mind :-P

2007-11-09T12:22:00.000+01:00

Hey everyone!

It’s starting to feel lonely again with no pictures… on this page anyway. It also feels like I’m talking to myself… but it’s okay I have a tendency to do that quite often :-P.

Back on track though! Yes so going around England was loads of fun, and the Saturday before we were leaving my aunt (Natalie) was in a cycling contest for a charity more to the north of England. It was a 100 mile cycle and she did it :-)! Woo! So we got her a miniature cake saying Natalie, Worlds Best Cyclist. I’ll put a picture up of it :-P.

Someone found us a house and it looked okay in the pictures… So we packed everything up after being in England for a month, said our goodbyes, with a lot of tears, even from Jett. And off we went on a 17 hour drive! Well actually it was about two or three hours and then we arrived at the underground train. You park your car on it, stay in your car and half an hour later you’re in France.

I thought the underground train would be a lot more exciting… but it was just like sitting in your car that you’ve parked in a long, white room, with little windows on the sides that you couldn’t really see out of, but it got the job done anyway, it’s not as if they could have put a theme park or anything in there :-P.

Now it was the long 15 hour haul… for my mom anyway since she drove the whole the way, with a break only now and then for coffee. The first stop we made in France was at a little side-store that had a coffee bar inside and was still open. So we went inside and you’d never believe the odds! There were two guys there that were driving to Belgium… but they spoke English :-)! We chatted for a while, they said you might see us at our next stop (we didn’t :-P). And then off we went again. I couldn’t really sleep the whole time; a few times I dozed off but was interrupted by an elbow in my side or a leg in MY foot space!

It was slightly… okay very cramped in the back of the car… first there was Venetia, then Karen and then Gizmo taking up when my feet were supposed to go… and of course me. I always get the middle seat >:-. So I was extremely squashed :-P and it was very difficult to get to sleep because I didn’t have a door or anything to put my head against, so I got very grumpy when I was woken up after saying that I was going to sleep and not to bother me… Grrr!

It was alright though, when we finally arrived and met up with the owner of the house, my dad filled in the papers, she showed us around and then left. It was okay… at least this house’s kitchen was tiled, it had more than five rooms, a sofa and even a T.V. It also came with the stove, fridge and washing-machine. Big upgrade from our Sicilian house… or so I thought until there were more aliens, too many flies and dare I say it… MICE!

There were upsides to the house too though. A five minute walk from the house was the gorgeous lake that all of my fishing photos were taken at, an absolutely gianormous garden and even two pear trees… but they were very tall pear trees so I only ever managed to whack one off and after all of my effort when it finally tumbled down… I could hardly bite into it because it wasn’t ripe yet! So I let Gizmo have a go at tackling it then threw it away after the pear having several miniature puncture wounds from Gizmo’s vampire teeth :-P.

In that house we were also surrounded by fields, and just a few minutes walk was an animal sanctuary… which could explain the fly situation, seriously every day I was swatting at least 20 flies, but they just kept coming from nowhere! I had a pet spider there though, he sat in the lounge/dining room/kitchen in a little corner. Yes I know, huh :-S, it was a big room that housed all of the downstairs rooms in one :-P.

Anyway yes so the spider was so much fun to watch catching a fly and then quickly wrapping it up! I don’t know what happened but sadly one day (a few days before we were leaving for the new house), I came down stairs to find that my spider had shrunk! Instead of my big one it was this little tiny baby, he was pretty cute actually but meant that he couldn’t catch the flies any more!

Speaking of spiders! Woah! At that house there was an absolutely gianormous spider that lived above one of the bushes outside by the house. It was the identical colouring of the bumble bees that it ate! Venetia took a few pictures of him, so I’ll also put that picture up.
They were quite a few insects in that house actually… the most annoying… and scariest were the giant aliens that fell down by you when you went to close the window! I don’t know how many times I almost had a heart attack in that house! I did love the geckos and lizards that came into the house though, especially the baby ones!

Oh my word they were the cutest! About as big as my baby finger, in length! I saw one in the kitchen then decided to go out on a hunt for them outside… can you tell how bored I was :-P? After just a few minutes I spotted one and tried to catch him, he wriggled away under the rocks though. The next week or so I actually caught one, kept him for an hour or so then let him go in the grass again. The one in the kitchen lived in a little hole in the wall and would come out onto the window sill every now and then to sun bathe. I tried to lure him out with bread… it didn’t work.

Even in the new house there used to be one baby lizard that would come out and sun bathe on the patio, since it’s gotten cold I haven’t seen him around lately…

There’s been loads of insects here, once there was even a preying-mantis! Now he was cool! We named him Barley because of the look of barley on his stomach. Woah, and there was also this giant caterpillar, he was huge and very pretty too :-P!

The things that weren’t so cool though were the amount of snakes… the first one was when my mom, Venetia and I were going walking, we were about 15 minutes into our usual routine when suddenly my mom started walking backwards and saying… a sentence over and over again… I don’t think I’ll type it out :-P. The snake was about as long as my leg but once we got closer, we noticed how flat it was… it had been run over or something so not much danger there. We carried on going.

A few days later my dad and I were sitting outside practising our French, I was looking at the book and my dad jumped up told me to go to the other side of the garden, so I stood up even though I didn’t know what was happening… then I saw that large, green snake making its way with a lifted head toward my dad. Gizmo also seemed to notice it at this stage… he just got up and began waddling over to it. My dad yelled at him and Gizmo came running to me. I ran to the house put Gizmo inside then went to find something heavy for my dad, since we still hadn’t had the internet in this house and also hadn’t been able to find out what snakes where poisonous. I found a large concrete type thing that was lying by the house, as I did this I heard a THWUMP and quickly grabbed it and carried it back to my dad. Saw the snake limp… not limp like walking weirdly… mainly because snakes slither. I mean that it was dead.

It was really sad, but my dad had to since it stood on its tail and was getting ready to strike. Later on we found out that green snakes aren’t poisonous here either, it’s just the small black ones that can kill. It’s also the big green ones that’ll act all dangerous but the little ones will run… well slither away.

One day I was brushing my hair, stood by the window and because it was hot I decided to have a good look around to see if I could spot a snake. What are the odds! This thing which I thought was a lizard’s head at first was coming over a rock and moving toward the house, I kept watching it for a second and then realised what it was once its whole body was visible and no legs were to be seen. It began slithering against the house, this is when I yelled for my mom and told her that there was a viper (the small, black, poisonous one) outside. My mom ran outside to see if she could kill it or catch it, but it was already making its way for the rocks and had gone. From then on I made sure that I watched Gizmo and didn’t let him go into the tall grass when he went outside… I also started to wear shoes when I went outside as well :-P.

Oh another snake incident was when we came to have a look at the new house. My mom and I walked by the house and you’d never guess what crossed the path right in front of us! Yes, that’s right another snake! It was only a green one though, but it was still big and began coming for us, we backed away quickly, so it kept slithering and lifted itself over the person’s fence next door… moving to this house I thought we were escaping the snakes!

No other snake stories though… also no fishing ones! It’s just become so cold! I’m hoping to hear from you all soon!

- Bianca

They speak English!

2007-11-08T12:28:00.001+01:00

Hey Everyone!

So yesterday we arrived in England… well I wrote about it yesterday anyway :-P. Seeing my mom, Gizmo and Karen was great. But then there were MORE great things to come on the second day of being in England. My sleep wasn’t the best because I was staying at my grandmother’s (Karen) house… and her son and daughter-in-law live with her too… they have a cat. I absolutely love cats but there’s a tiny problem I have with them… I’m allergic :-O!

But never mind that because after four days of suffering, oh woe me :-P, no it wasn’t that bad, we moved into my cousins, uncle and aunt’s house which is literally across the road… okay around one road, down another, around one more and then there it was :-P.

Oh yes, the MORE to come on the second day was that I went to the super store with my mom and (:-O. You have no idea how happy I was to be understood and that I could understand people there! They speak English… I know, no duh you are in England but that’s not the point!

I had missed it so much… I just couldn’t stop smiling, it was when the guy at the till said the price and bid us a good day that I realised how much I had missed it… he seemed pretty confused at why I had a grin from ear to ear on but, I didn’t care, at least he spoke English! It is something that I still miss even living in France where there’s more English speakers here than Sicily but it was amazing. I never knew how easy I had it and I actually can’t remember any other “shopping experiences” (like talking to people at a store…) before I’d moved to a non-English speaking country. So it’s so true! You don’t know what you have until it’s gone.

Then again… I did miss the weather in Sicily too… I mean I really, really missed it…. And I had really, really appreciated it there as well :-P! It was absolutely freezing in Farringdon… but my two little cousins loved playing outside and so I had to bite the bullet and stick there with them, in the end I tempted them to come back inside with milkshake! Mmm milkshake, it fixes everything :-P.

Anyway on the forth day, this is now the seventh of May (Ha! I was a poet and I didn’t even know it… until I re-read the sentence anyway :-P) I saw the rest of the crew – Luke (16), Matthew (13… Matt was born on the same day as me! He’s only 12 hours older. He was 6am I was 6pm :-P), Darius (11), I know there’s an awful lot here ;-P, Daniel and Jett (who’s 4 and 3, aw how cute :-P)!

Just read over the Matthew thing, in case you don’t know our birthday’s the 1st of February… now you have no excuse to forget it and can’t not send me in a nice picture of you kissing a fish :-P. Pucker up!

On the 8th of May, it was my sister’s birthday! My aunt, Simone, baked a… actually two chocolate cakes for Venetia, you heard the list of names! One would’ve just been finished in an instant of it being brought out :-P. Oh yummy, those cakes were just… so yummy!

We took tonnes of pictures but most of them are of Venetia and I stuffing our faces with chocolate cake… or the one’s that were taken too early and we were trying to fix our hair! Quite a few random ones of a vase of flowers… I think these where taken by my one cousin when he got his hands on the camera :-P.

Most of the days that we were in England it was raining, so we didn’t really get up to much. I made sure I watched a good amount of English T.V. whilst I was there though :-P. In France it’s a very odd occasion that there’s English on the television. Except for the Nespresso, what else? ad, they don’t dub it :-P.

We stayed in England for a month, on the last Sunday Simone, David (my uncle), the boys, Karen, my parents, Venetia and I, wow quite a list there :-P, went to a few museums and galleries. In one of the museums there were little stuffed chickens, that was really sad but my little cousins didn’t seem to mind… I guess they’re boys :-P also fake dodo birds, dinosaur, giraffe, elephant and rhino skeletons and my favourite, the luminous crystal room! I was wearing converse so the laces looked so cool in the light. Of course we got pictures on my moms camera phone :-P.

Oh yeah before I forget! It’s winter now, no duh :-P, but that means that bees and wasps and looking for warm places to keep snuggled up. Yesterday my mom got stung by the wasp or a hornet on her leg twice and her hand at least four times! It was hiding in her trousers and then quickly flew away to the other side of the room once it had done the damage.

We didn’t know what to do so I put got the cream out, then my dad said to put vinegar on, the vinegar soothed the sting but today a few hours later it swelled up and today it’s still all swollen. Today I found out though that once you’re stung if you put a copper penny on it and hold the penny on the sting for 15 minutes it should take the sting away and it won’t even swell up!

Great to know, but a bit late now :-P. Well I’m going to leave it at that! Hope to hear from you all soon!

- Bianca

Leaving Sicily

2007-11-07T12:59:00.001+01:00

Hey everyone!

Well yes, it was the night before we left we were all packed up and ready to go. It was really strange leaving that house. Now that I think about it I didn’t actually leave that much behind in Sicily. It was strange not doing anything with the refrigerator and the washing-machine. We just left them in the house for Giovanni to have.

I left a few "warm" (... not light) clothes, thinking that I wouldn't need them in south-west France… wow, I was wrong! That giant, jumper thing really could’ve come in handy today. It’s been absolutely FREEZING *shivers*! But it can’t get much worse because all of the French are already in giant jackets and jumpers… unless they just stay wrapped up in duvets next to a cosy fire in winter… and even if they do, I’m up for that :-D!

So anyway we were all packed with the things we actually needed. Now going back we only had 3 suitcases… I wanted to bring the swing that we’d got in Sicily… it was such a cool swing; see what I mean about not being so great with leaving things behind! But in the end the swing was still swinging silently on its own, hanging from the tree that I had tied it to :-(.

Yeah, we only had three suitcases because my mom was in England and therefore wasn’t flying with us. The flight we’d taken was only one suitcase per person… my mom had to leave most of her things behind (my dad was packing :-P)… but it was mainly just her jumpers and shoes.

The lemons in Sicily were absolutely enormous (just remembered how much I miss them)! If you make a fist with your hand that’s the size they were! Okay, if you make a fist with my hand :-P… The first day in England I walked into Karen’s dining room where my sister and my aunt (Natalie) were.

There was this… thing on the table. It was like a Sicilian lemon… but a million times smaller. I burst into fits of laughter and asked “What is that thing?!”… yes that was a lemon, Natalie seemed pretty confused, but Venetia joined in with my fits of giggles and then explained to Natalie. We’d only been away from the U.K. for two months, but really… this is what I used to think was a lemon! Ha! You’d get at least a quarter of a tall glass filled with lemon juice from one! Four would make a whole jug of lemon juice… here you’d have to use like twenty! Pathetic :-P!

Right, yes back to Sicily. Sorry keep getting side-tracked! On the last night in Sicily, we drank an abnormal amount of milkshake (since we had a lot of milk in the fridge… and coincidently a lot of chocolate powder) and played jack-change-it to pass the time. We got to bed pretty early, then I was woken up at… okay I can’t remember the exact time, but it was much earlier than early for me. It was around about two am-ish… maybe four.

Once we were all ready we packed up the car and off we went. I was cramped in the back with suitcases sticking into my sides and a heavy carry-on-case on my lap. After an hour of being stuck like this we arrived at the airport, had a nice long stretch and then brought our bags inside.

So you’re wondering what we did with the car? Well even if you’re not I’m going to tell you anyway :-P. Do you remember that guy I told you about I think it was eight blogs ago, the one that we met in the small electrical shop on the first day of being in Sicily, where we wanted to buy a SIM card from? He had moved to Sicily 11 years ago from Scotland and was teaching in Palermo University. Yeah, him! Well let’s just say Robert. Well Robert’s son had just turned 18 and Robert had wanted to buy a car for him. My dad had found this out when he’d phoned him to ask if he wanted our car. What are the odds, eh?

So Robert met us up in the airport, had coffee (what else?... Sicilians drink far too much coffee... but being in Sicily it’s difficult not to get hooked on the strong stuff with a coffee bar on every single street… I even did) with his wife and my dad, signed the papers then drove off in the car. Now it was just a waiting game for the check-in and then the flight to finally see my mom, who I hadn’t seen for almost a month now and then there was also Gizmo!!!

We had our last Sicilian coffee and breakfast then went off to check-in. Not again! Our bags were the correct weight combined but not separately… it was like so what’s the difference… apparently there is a difference :-P. So we spread out the weights into the different bags, and then finally checked in… I had to leave my binoculars behind, which I’d been traipsing around with me since Ireland :-P.

After an hour of waiting in the waiting area, the woman announced that it was “All Aboard Time” okay she didn’t actually say this but it was something in Italian and then everyone started moving quickly towards the doors… so this was sort of a gesture that we could start lining up to show our passports and tickets.

If you every go to Sicily be warned! Most Sicilians do not like waiting in a queue, so either stand your ground or move to the back before you get trampled on… or ultimately squashed between people.

We buckled ourselves in and with a smooth start (and no ear popping) we were off. My mom told us to look out for an ice lake shaped like a bears head somewhere to the north of Italy or south of France during the flight, but it was too cloudy… or it could have just been when I was busy concentrating on my coca cola and I didn’t notice it :-P.

The flight was actually a lot of fun. There were a few teenagers more to the front that got down their electric guitars and started playing (not plugged in of course). Later on I turned my MP3 player up really loud, over the voices of the cabin, then I heard this ATCHOO! Turned to Venetia knowing it would’ve been her and said “I heard that even OVER my loud music!”… we burst into fits of giggles.

Later on we landed, stood around like everyone else waiting for the bags to come through. When they did we grabbed them. Adjusted them so that they’d stop slipping off the trolley and off we went to see my mom! As we came around the corner I couldn’t see her no matter how many times Venetia said, “There she is, no Bianca over there! That way!” Then I spotter her… right in front of everyone else, ran up to her and gave her a gianormous hug… or rather she gave me the gianormous hug… I was left powerless :-P.

We went over to the car and drove south for a good hour or so, stopping at a fast food place on the way. Since I’d only been once in Sicily and was craving milkshake… you’d think I would’ve had enough on the last night in Sicily for me to never want any more for a lifetime :-P… I hadn’t.

We finally arrived in a nice little village, then went to Karen’s house, I could hear Gizmo barking before the car had even stopped. I jumped out and Gizmo was already out to greet me. I had missed him so much!

Gizmo wants to play now and the sun’s starting to shine again. So going to leave it at that and will be back soon :-P. Hope to hear from you all.

- Bianca

Leaving Sicily... okay actually I never quite got around to it this time...

2007-11-06T14:08:00.000+01:00

Hey everyone!

Trying to think of where we were last :-P… oh right yeah! Okay well once my mom left for England, a week or two later my dad got a job offer. I’m pretty sure I’ve told you this before but I’ll just refresh your memories… and mine :-P!

In our Sicilian house since we were in what they called the country side and too far away from any phone lines so we didn’t even have a telephone or the internet in that house! Giovanni promised it would be within the first week… then domani, domani, domani (tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow). Per sempre domani (always tomorrow)!

The telephone guys came, looked and said “Yes, too far away for a telephone line”. We’ll need to put more in. The next time they came, they measured the distance, then after 15 minutes of being at the house went for a two hour lunch break!

They never came again, so the whole time in Sicily we didn’t have internet or telephone. Except for when we went to an internet café or telephone place. So anyway to get on with my original story, my dad received the job offer in a tiny, ramshackle-like telephone booth place since it was the closest to our house… and generally like most of the telephone places in Mazara del Vallo.

And of course in case you haven’t noticed or read in previous posts it was in south-west France :-). My dad accepted, and then my mom booked us tickets out of Sicily for the forth of May. You see my mom had to be in Sicily or we had to be in England before the eighth of May because it would have been my sister’s 18th birthday.

I was barely able to bring myself to stay in that house for the last three weeks. It was so boring!

We did have a little bit of fun though, even tough we were stuck in the middle of a family fight between Jovanna, Giovanni’s fiancé, also given a random name made up by, yours truly… me! Okay, okay I got it off an Italian girls name site :-P… and it’s just the girl version of Giovanni… I know I’m so unoriginal… and Jovanna’s brother-in-law. They wanted the house for summer… don’t ask me why they’d want that house, but whatever their reason was, they wanted it.

I’m using the word “they” because it was Jovanna’s brother-in-law’s father as well as the brother-in-law. Those two were really sly things. First off they made Jovanna’s mother pay them to fix up the house for us… which they did NOT do such a great job of… in my opinion. Is there actually a point to painting the outside of the house… and then just leaving the kitchen floor tile-less because they’d done “their work” :-P. Secondly they planted a snake in our garden! Yes it was them… I reckon so anyway.

They came to paint the walls on the patio one day and went into the garden to get the wheelbarrow, but when they left they just stood around waiting for my dad to come up and they left the wheelbarrow outside the garden instead of putting it back.

That day, my dad and Giovanni were sitting in the garden. My dad spotted a giant green snake slithering across the ground, calmly told Giovanni… Giovanni jumped up looked around then ran to my dad’s side… I hope you know the descriptive word for Giovanni that I’m thinking because I’d really rather not write it out :-P.

My dad asked him if he should kill it, if it was poisonous. Giovanni said yes. So my dad got the spade…. And you can imagine what happened next I’m sure.

Later that day Giovanni said that the last time he saw a snake was at a barbeque seven years ago… and THEN told my dad that green snakes aren’t poisonous… this from the guy that ran to my dad when he saw the snake and told my dad to kill it!

A few days later Jovanna’s brother-in-law… I can’t even remember his real name… so let’s say Alfonso. So Alfonso came around with his wife. My dad said in Italian “I found your snake!” he said “Mio serpente?!” (my snake) “Yes, your snake”, was my dad’s reply. So now Alfonso didn’t know if it was just a foreigner to the Italian language with the incorrect words… or of course that we knew it was him who placed it there :-P. Mind boggling!

After he got over the confusing-ness of my dad’s comment he asked what colour it was. And then proved that it must have been them because his wife and he said “Oooh green, it is very, very poisonous! Brown is okay but GREEN!”… So who to believe now… hmmm.

My dad told Giovanni about them saying this and he said… yes… but no it was not green it was brown! Since it was clearly green :-P. We went down to the farmer by us and asked him. Green is not poisonous. We decided to believe him :-P.

So now you can see that we had good enough reasons to leave Sicily. Even though it was gorgeous… some of the people that we met weren’t. So I guess if we had had a better experience and had found a nice house, we would never have left and I wouldn’t be writing this… lucky I had that experience then, eh? :-P

(South-west Sicily, Bageria)

Tomorrow I’ll write about leaving Sicily :-P. See you all then. Hope to hear from you soon (spirits still high :-P).

- Bianca

There's an ALIEN in my tea-cup!

2007-11-05T11:41:00.000+01:00

Hey everyone!

Before I start remember that you have to start reading from the next page and work your way backwards :-P…

In Sicily at Giovanni’s place we didn’t really do much. For three days there, there were bad thunder and lightning storms, but it was really cool to watch because you could see the ocean from the room my parents were in.

Since we still didn’t have a car, Giovanni found one for us and brought my parents to go see it… when they came back I was utterly shocked at what they had bought… it was one of those little, white fiat-unos… it did the job though and was very handy for our great escape of Sicily :-P!

Giovanni also said that he’d help find us a house… what he found is not quite what I’d call a house…

We stayed at his bed and breakfast for three weeks, our pastimes usually long, late barbeques. After we got the car though we did go out and about seeing places a lot. Giovanni’s fiancé’s mother was fixing up a “house” for rent and we just happened to be in need of a house. So Giovanni, like any sales person would put two and two together and brought us around to this so-called “house”…

We went around it… this took a very short time :-P as to how small it was. Apparently it was furnished, which consisted of 4 beds, the bathroom, a dining table… and a stove. WOW, great going with the furnishing :-P.

It had five rooms (in total, yes in total, not just the bedrooms). Three bedrooms, the bathroom and the kitchen/dining room which she promised she’d tile and never got around to it. It did have a good sized garden though and a grape vineyard 2 minutes walk from the house. The garden was full of orange and lemon trees and even prickly pear cacti… the rest of the garden though was absolutely overgrown… everywhere.

We took the house since it was the only thing we could find, I know it was a stupid decision but awk well too late now :-P.

We were in soon enough (the picture dates tell me that it was 16th of April, and we’d only taken these at least a week of being in the house) and had settled down. My mom decided to fly back to England to her mom and Gizmo since Karen (my mom's mom) was taking so long in packing to get herself over to Sicily with us.

My mom kissed us goodbye, she got on the plane and off she went. The next three weeks droned on and on and on for the three of us. We were sick of sitting in the house, or playing jack-change-it (a card game, the rules continuously increased as we got more bored... in the end it was hard to keep up :-P).

To understand Giovanni you’d have to have known him… he was like a snake with a smile. He’d become your friend and rip you off at the same time in fact one of his favourite phrases to use on us was “my friend”… it’s very frustrated to think that we fell for him. Then again the more that I think about I don’t think he realised. Some Sicilians (mainly Giovanni :-P) are the type like I help you, now you must help me… or in Giovanni’s case it was more like I help you… now you must pay me :-P.

The first few days in the house were… there’s actually no real word to describe it. I just sat here for 5 minutes trying to think of one and… none! Well… in the third day or so I was about to go run a bath for myself and ended up running to my parents room yelling “There’s an ALIEN in the bath!!!”… it was not funny at the time :-P.

It was seriously an alien-like creature. It was light amber-brown, had a long-spindly body with… literally millions of LONG legs and antennas. I know you’re thinking oh that’s just a centipede… that was NOT a centipede!

We found tonnes in that Sicilian house, so since I found the first one it has adopted the name of “alien” so from now on don’t be alarmed if I refer to something like, “there was an alien in the tea-cup!” … this did happen once. My sister almost had a heat attack when she was making tea :-P… now that was funny!

Actually one night in our room (we were sharing one in that house) there was an alien on the wall and a gecko on the other. Venetia refused to sleep unless I got at least the gecko out. So I got my jewellery box, dumped everything on my bed, made the gecko come down of the wall. By about a few inches of the ground the poor thing fainted and fell to the floor. I was so devastated and just wanted to leave it alone. Venetia on the other hand kept moaning and wouldn’t go to sleep >:-(! So I ushered the gecko into the box and put the lid on top. Now Venetia wanted me to put the gecko outside. No way that I was going out there at this time of night! So I let it loose in the kitchen :-P.

Of course Venetia was not happy about this but I was too tired. I climbed into bed and was almost asleep when I was disturbed by a crazy creature… known as, yes that’s right, Venetia. Apparently now I had to get the alien out. I got up dragged Venetia’s bed with her still on it to my side of the room and tried to go to sleep again. Nope this wasn’t good enough :-P. I said that I’d get the alien down but she’d have to put it in a box.

I put Venetia’s bed back, got the broom and swept the alien off the wall, then climbed back into bed…now the alien had gone under the wall… after Venetia doing what she needed to do, even though I said if she did it I’d never talk to her again, we went to sleep. The next morning I was talking again >.<.

As I'm sure you can see I talk far too much :-P. So I’m going to leave it at that and get back on track with it tomorrow.

Still hoping to hear from you all soon :-P!

- Bianca

Pretty much random stuff!

2007-11-01T12:09:00.000+01:00

Hey there!

Well yesterday I said about Halloween and the French calling before they came, so my impression was that they had to know you to trick or treat. Last night I found out that trick or treating here is like anywhere :-P. Except they all just go in big groups with a few parents. They were all so CUTE! It was like a horde of … deadly things :-P. None of them rang the bell… they might have been too small to reach… there were miniature ghosts, werewolves, bright, orange pumpkins and even twin witches! :-P. So that was nice :-).

Well now that Halloween is over it’s time to look forward to CHRISTMAS! Woo! The only thing that’s worrying me is my grandmother. She’s in Ireland at the moment and was supposed to be sending us our Christmas decorations from my cousins’ house. She still hasn’t and keeps putting it off >.<.

It’s not too difficult, one of my cousins just has to go up get the decorations down from their attic, measure the boxes and send them… we’ve had them since we arrived in Ireland, so it’s ten years of memories.

There’s even a clay Christmas tree and bright florescent pink present decoration that I made in school when I was seven! Oh and these little gift boxes made out of old Christmas cards. I just wanted to get a hold of one to see how I made it :-P. They’re really cute, we made little sweet things at school to put inside… of course the sweet thing was long gone before the box arrived home :-P.

I’m really looking forward to Christmas, but this is the first year that my sister’s been working. She’s applied for Christmas week off so I really hope she gets it :-P.

Back to now though.

I made Gizmo a devil headband thing for Halloween but forgot to put it on him when the trick or treat-ers came >.<, oh well. I’ll get a picture of him for all of you guys to see :-P! Back to Sicily now! (I just can’t seem to make up my mind :-P)

Well we stayed with Giovanni for three weeks. His bed and breakfast was a 5 minute walk from the ocean… on his website it said from a beach. But in Sicily you can hardly ever find any beaches that are clean enough or… well generally beach-y enough… by beach-y I mean sandy. Usually it’s just all rocks.

We did find a few gorgeous beaches though, on one we had a picnic and watched a guy go fishing for octopus! That was so cool, he actually caught one as well! He was just snorkelling around and was holding a cage. I didn’t see any spear so I get the impression that he just grabbed it... didn’t get too close to see what colour it was though.

I was just reading some stories about people going fishing and I found quite an interesting one. A man was going fishing for catfish in the Ohio River near Louisville but instead of catching the catfish that he wanted, he caught a six foot octopus!

Well I’m going to leave it at that. Hope to hear from you all soon!

- Bianca

Hmm...

2007-10-31T16:47:00.001+01:00

Hey everybody!

First off, Happy Halloween! I hope you have a good one :-). I’m not doing anything today other than my usual home-schooling, but what about you guys? I’m not sure if they go trick or treat-ing in France, apparently they call before they come. So I get the impression that the kids would have to know the person they went trick or treating to. Much safer that way :-P.

French T.V. doesn’t even put scary movies on. Yesterday they were advertising Les Experts: Manhattan (which is basically CSI: Manhattan)… well I guess that can be scary sometimes :-P!

Okay well I don’t really want to write yet another blog consecutively on Sicily again, so we’ll make it a little more spicy this time… or at least slightly different…

FRANCE! Well as you all know I have absolutely no friends what so ever in France… STILL! Depressing, eh?

Well… I have had contact with people my age about a month ago, Venetia and I went into town. Today I didn’t want to go into town, I thought we were just going to pick something up quickly (so I hadn’t dressed appropriately) but then my mom and dad wanted to go to the bank and Venetia wanted to go into town.

So we made arrangements that when they were finished they’d meet up with us. I went with Venetia to town we walked around for a bit, and then Venetia noticed that two girls were following us…

We went into Game, came out, walked down the street and turned down one of the side streets that brought you to the main square centre. Here one of them called “Excuse moi!”, we stopped and she was making movements in a shape of a skirt, shaking her head then pointing at me.

Yes, the locals of all of the countries that I have moved to like to play charades :-P. Well we stopped, Venetia ran behind me looked to see if my skirt had gone… too far up :-P, it hadn’t.

Later on, through a lot of confusion and A LOT of “Did you understand that?” “No.” coming from both sides. In the end I said “Ah c’est trop court pour FRANCE! Je comprend maintenante! (Ah it’s too short for FRANCE! I understand now.” This was followed by a whole lot of “Oui”’s in French from them :-P.

It was true I hadn’t seen any other girls (… or boys) in France with skirts on with no leggings or tights. As they were telling me that the boys in France are folle (crazy) and making circular movements to their forehead, a bunch of teenagers came over and started cat-whistling… Grrrrreeeeeaaaaat timing!

The guys left after a while of me saying goodbye in … a good few languages (since I couldn’t think of much French) and Aurora and… okay didn’t quite catch the tallest one’s name saying… other things in French, let’s just leave it at that :-P.

We exchanged e-mail addresses and then parted. Venetia and I walked around for about an hour, met up with our parents, then bumped in Aurora and … the other one :-P, this time they were chatting to two friends, they introduced us. One had lived in Canada for four years so spoke amazing English… so that was a HUGE help :-P!

They asked our parents if they could take us around our little town and to a place called Tecktonik. Now every time they said “Tecktonik” they did a movement with their arms and legs… we figured it was a dance thing… our parents said yes and off we went.

As we walked around the corner at the top of the road, I realised it was the group of teenagers that I had dreaded ever bumping into… because you know how teenagers have their cliques and it’s like, you’re hardly just going to walk over to them and start speaking (in a completely different language)… it’d just be awkward!

Well I stopping mid-step, wide eyed and just stood there, they turned around and said “C’est bon!”, “Mai ma JUPE! Le juuuuupe!!!!” (But my SKIRT! The skiiiiirt!). They laughed then the Canadian one said “Don’t worry!” and so off I went… very reluctantly…

They were all actually very nice! One guy even said in perfect English “Hi, What’s up?”… of course this was the only English he knew :-P. I haven’t really seen Aurora or… the other one in town so as per usual I just steer away from that crowd :-P.

Oh right yeah I never told you what Tecktonik was. It’s a new type of dancing that originated in France, it’s cross between, techno, break dancing and hip hop… very strange looking at first, but it grows on you :-P…

Yikes! Just read a past blog and realised that I’ve told you about this… but in short term, aw well it’s writen out now :-P. Well I’m going to leave it at that and hope not to repeat myself anymore than I have.

Hope to hear from you all soon! (Oh look at that! Already repeating myself :-P)

- Bianca (And again (:-O what a shocker! :-P)

Save The Bees!

2007-10-30T11:44:00.000+01:00

Hey Everyone!

Every Morning the first thing I do on my computer is check Yahoo! News. This morning I found some really interesting videos. The bees are slowly dying! A beehive owner found his beehives to be abandoned one day, no bees in sight, not even dead ones! Apparently it’s because of a relatively new nicotine based insecticide that slows the immune system of insects including cute, little bumblebees. Yes they can give quite a sting, but amazingly their venom is actually good for you. It strengthens your immune system… unless of course you are allergic then… well the bees aren’t good news for you :-P.

Lots of fruits rely on bees (wow, this sounds like one of those boring things that you have to read and then answer questions about in school, urgh!)… for instance blueberries because of their difficult to get into urn shaped flowers, they are very hard to populate.

Now what was the shape of the blueberry flower? Yes, that’s correct an URN shape. Well done! No I’m only joking, I’ll carry on with some (slightly) more interesting… stories now :-P.

On our last few days staying in Palermo, we looked around at a few houses… these didn’t interest us much… well the one was absolutely lovely … but the guy who wanted to rent it would only be ready in six months time! So this wouldn’t really work for us…

So we went into an internet café, since we were staying in a bed and breakfast by this stage and they didn’t have an open access to internet options. We were looking for another B&B and “something” just seemed to take my sisters fancy to the west of the country, on an interactive map. We clicked on it and it brought up a list of B&B’s.

We found one that took our liking. On the website it said he could speak Italian, English (Woo Hoo!) and Spanish… we called him up and yes he could speak English… later we found out that he just put Spanish on for the sake of it and that he couldn’t really speak that. But it didn’t matter because he spoke English :-P!

Now the question was how where we going to get there. It was quite far down and we didn’t have a car yet. So we just took a long trip on a… long trip bus, stopping at a hotel for the night before we were booked into (Okay I’m going to give him a fake name, because personally, he doesn’t know I’m writing this and if he ever googles himself, like we know we all do, come on admit it, then that won’t be so great) Giovanni’s place (Italian enough name there :-P).

The bus was supposed to drop us off, close enough to the hotel but we accidentally got off too early thinking that it had stopped for good and then off it went again we were like (:-O! So my dad and I went to find a taxi… later to find out that, what are the odds, this town only has one or two! Soon we found one; he was an old-ish guy sleeping in the front of his car. The newsagent man that told us that he was the taxi guy, yelled across the street and woke him up :-P. Then off we went to our hotel, phew!

Oh actually the first time we ever took the bus in Sicily we were kicked off it! Not because we were naughty or anything… mainly because we didn’t know we had to STAMP the ticket in the ticket machine. How mean of them! No-one actually does unless the inspector comes on the bus, because if you don’t you can just use it for a different bus journey.

Yes, so to carry on with what I was saying, we took the bus, stayed in a hotel for the night called Villa Favourita. It was really cool, instead of a big building with rooms… you had your own detached IGLOO! Yes an igloo… or close enough to one anyway. It was a giant white dome shaped thing… tonnes of them just plopped down in an open area with orange and lemon trees growing around, on the sides of the paths… Venetia and I also recorded there as well… we were just messing around though… no real footage :-P.

There was this thing on top of the netted football section by our igloo and we thought it was a slice of toast… don’t ask us how it got there it just did! So we tried to get it down by throwing our ball up and whacking it (how old are we :-P)… it just kept “rolling” back to the middle of the net though, in the end we realised that it was a just a stone… PRETENDING to be a slice of toast! It was so funny!

The next morning we were up nice and early, it wasn’t the best of days but it was nice enough. We had arranged for “Giovanni” to come pick us up from the hotel to take us to his place.

He arrived looking like any Sicilian does at this time of year. In an abnormally large black jacket and sunglasses. We packed up our suitcases and he took us to his place. Once we arrived he brought us upstairs, showed us our rooms then he dragged my dad downstairs and took him shopping for a barbeque that he wanted to have with us…

The one good thing that we learnt from Giovanni was that lemon juice on a sausage is… AMAZING! It has to be the nicest way to eat barbequed meat! Seriously you have to try it!

Giovanni was …. quite a character. He took us fishing once… it only lasted about 15 minutes… the worm that was destined to the hook BIT him as a desperate, final move! It was an evil looking thing (the worm was too :-P). No really. The worm looked like something out of the movie Men in Black, it’s whole mouth opened wide and a new… I don’t know what you’d call it… a tongue maybe with incisors on it… it was really nasty…! They are sea worms. We’d gotten so many in the box and because of the fact that we had only fished for 15 minutes, we still had all of those biting worms. So Giovanni threw them all into the water and off they swam or stuck to a piece of seaweed.. they were really weird!

Right, well I’ll leave it at that, don’t want to freak you out too much. See I eventually got back around to fishing!

Hope to hear from you soon.

- Bianca

Even more on Sicily... :-P

2007-10-29T11:47:00.001+01:00

Hello again!

As you can see I don’t post blogs over the weekend… so I have to refresh my memory now…

We stayed in Sicily for two months, the first two weeks of that were spent in Palermo. Palermo’s the main city, like Paris is for France. The three weeks there we saw some absolutely amazing things! Like I said before the statues there were absolutely gorgeous, gargoyles on the buildings, and statues that the city has been built around, we were just wandering around and somehow managed to bump into Piazza Pretoria… a very… nude fountain :-P… it was finished being built in 1581 and since the Public square has still been called the Palermitani Public square of the Shame because of how… nude it is :-P.

Moving on… my dad’s family took us to lots of places around Palermo. One for instance was Saint Rosalia; I know that I’ve said before. Well if you ever go, I’m warning you now that it is a very, long, steep drive up the mountain and lemon scented air fresheners do not help at all! It made my stomach turn and gave me a headache, but once we reached the very, tippy top and breathed in the wonderfully fresh air, I was fine again :)!

We parked then had to climb quite a few steps until we finally made it. It was very pretty actually, with the mountain, looking as if it was leaning on the cathedral… really the cathedral had been built into the mountain.
Here’s a little bit of history for you now, come on it won’t kill you to read it :-P! Saint Rosalia was born in 1130 to a Norman noble family that were descendents of Charlemagne. Once she grew up she decided to go live as a “hermit” in the mountains. In 1166 she died, but nobody knew of it. Then in 1624 a plague took over Palermo, apparently Saint Rosalia “appeared” to a sick woman first. And then a hunter. She told the hunter to climb the mountain and described the cave in which he would find her remains in, so of course he did, finding the bones as she described. He brought them back down to Palermo and a cathedral was built in that cave.
Inside was gorgeous! If you read the post below you’ll see that I’ve already told you about the open area where the rain water came in, flowed down the pipes that were along the walls and then finished at the Holy water. As you walked past that bit, you came into the cathedral with the chairs and the altar but to the left was a large glass, tank sort of this with a marble and gold statue of Saint Rosalia and an angel inside, on top of that there was a box with everyone’s wishes that had visited it.
As you walk through the entrance there’s an absolute monster of an anchor just sitting there, quite confusing, eh? This isn’t a harbour… we’re on the top of a mountain :S… I was thinking.

Well the story goes that as a boat was sinking the people on it prayed to Saint Rosalia and voila ( <<< hey look at that! I’m really getting French here!!!) the boat stopped sinking. So the people that were on the boat carried the anchor all the way up the mountain!!! There’s a shrine with pictures and thank you messages with similar stories, for instance there’s a torn and scratched up motorbike helmet, no need in explaining this guy’s story :-P.

I was just trying to think of things to type and (:-O! I can’t believe that I haven’t told you about this thing yet!!! GELATO!!! I LOVE it SO much! It is Sicilian ice-cream (gelato is basically just the word ice-cream… except in Italian)…

My mouth’s watering just thinking of it! If you go to Sicily, you will come accustomed to seeing gelaterias on practically every street. A gelateria is an ice-cream parlour. You go in and there’s a counter filled with TONNES of different types of ice-cream. It is the most complex procedure EVER! Once you choose what you want then it’s simple enough :-P.

I was addicted to it. My favourite ever was Banane e frutti di bosco (I can’t believe I still remembered that… 5 months is a very long time to remember the name of an Italian ice-cream!), Banana and fruits of the forest. Oooh! *Drools* it was the nicest… even better than the cheesecake at Stansted airport :-P!

The nicest ice-cream that I’ve ever had in Ireland was Ben and Jerry’s Archaeological Dig from a tub or something like that. It was chocolate with chocolate shaped dinosaurs :-P! Mmmm yummy! The ice-cream from the ice-cream vans always gave me coughing attacks…

Well I think that’s enough about ice-cream now… next post I’ll tell you about more Sicilian adventures… that’s where the fun really begins :-P!

Hope to hear from you all soon.

- Bianca

How cool is this!!!

2007-10-26T11:57:00.000+02:00

Hey everyone!

I just started a Fishing Forum! Please check it out here -

http://kissmyfishy.proboards91.com/index.cgi?

I hope this will help with the commenting problem, even though you'll still need to sign up, at least you can use this more often than Blogspot! Woo! :-P!

Hope to hear from you ALL soon!

- Bianca :-)

More on Sicily!

2007-10-26T11:26:00.000+02:00

Hi everyone!

I don’t get it but because it’s a blog you have to start reading from the bottom and make your way up :-S. Noticed this a while ago just never thought to remind you guys :-P.

Right… now where was I with my last post… I’m not going to go by everyday in Sicily… mainly because I’ve forgotten a lot and I’ll only type up the interesting stuff :-P.

Sicilian’s (not all of them, but most) are very stubborn, they keep wearing their ginormous winter jackets and scarves, no matter what temperature the day is all the way up until June! Then they’re free to wear what they like :-P… of course I didn’t know this on my very first day of being in Sicily. I woke up and it was gorgeous outside, so as any sane person would do, after getting ready I put on LIGHT clothes.

Then again me coming straight from cold Ireland, it may actually have been cold for the locals and I just wasn’t used to it because I was so used to freezing temperatures… literally if Gizmo wanted to go outside in Ireland, I’d open the door just slightly let him out, struggle against the wind to close the door again, then run to a window and watch him… I was always afraid he’d get blown away :-P… we lived on a hill in the middle of the country side so… it COULD have been possible :-P!

Once we’d had breakfast we went for a walk around the area we were in. After 5 minutes of looking around I got stopped by an elderly man, who started rambling on in Sicilian, making vigorous arm movements towards me and then the sky, then him… me and the sky a final time… quite confusing… then he tapped my bare arms and said in Italian this time “cold?”, I laughed and said “No, I’m from Ireland”. He kissed me on the cheek and wandered off… it was very strange but then again, I didn’t know the Sicilian culture…

On the first day we had to get a phone SIM card, so we went into a small electrical shop… it is the most obvious thing to do :-P. Anyway we really couldn’t get our message across but strangely enough a guy walked into the shop at this exact time, the shop keeper greeted him and then said something in Italian… he immediately started speaking perfect English… what are the odds! It turns out he’d moved to Sicily 11 years ago from Scotland, and was now teaching at the university near by. Anyhow we got his number and the SIM card :-) and left. This left my spirits slightly higher, but they were later crushed again when I found out that an English speaker who’s not a tourist in Sicily is very odd :-P... AHHH!

Palermo is an absolutely gorgeous city… it just has a lot of stray dogs which you know what that leads (HA! Leads!!! Do you get it? :-P. I’m SO funny!!! … if you could hear me now, you’d know this is said in a sarcastic way… so just read it like that :-P) to on the ground :-P. Yeah! Some Sicilians don’t seem to love their animals as much as the French do. Over Easter there, some of them go on holiday and just set their dogs free to look after themselves, when they come back if their dog’s still there they’ll take it back… most aren’t though… on the motorway we say tonnes of little, fluffy, dead…dogs… it was absolutely heart breaking!

Our house that we found (I’ll get to this later), the garden of it, used to be the home of the guard dog of the house, before we moved in. Now the owners were supposed to take him away… they did. They just threw the poor thing into the boot, slammed it shut, drove down the lane and we thought that was the last we were going to hear of him. A few days later my sister and I took a walk down the lane only to find the poor thing tied to a tree on a short chain by the grape vines. We ran down to him and found that he had no water and today was absolutely blistering heat! We quickly walked back up to the house, got a few bottles of water brought them down to him and later that night we even brought him the left over from dinner.

The owners of the house, we noticed, came back and gave him some of those dog pebbles, but we still fed him sometimes… in the end my parents and I were even taking him for walks, we weren’t allowed to give him a name though because then we’d become too attached… he was part pointer it was really funny to watch him chase a lizard, then run around the rock digging at where he thought it had gone even though it had long run away through the grass.

But not all Sicilians are like this with their animals, one day, actually when we were leaving Palermo to go to Mazara del vallo, which is to the south west of Sicily (I’ll also get to that later).We were waiting for a train and we saw an elderly man with a puppy that would literally fit in your hand! He would push the puppy gently away with his foot then keep on walking, but the puppy kept coming back and jumping all over him… okay all over his ankle… it couldn’t really reach much higher :-P. Anyway he sat down on a bench doubled over with his arms flapping about playing with it. At the end he walked around the fountain and the puppy got distracted and was looking down at something through the gutter. The owner saw, then ran and “hid” behind a pole watching the puppy like a little boy.

Soon the puppy realised that it’s owner had gone missing and began running around, looking frantically for him, eventually it spotted his owner, ran over then went crazy! It was the last highlight of my time in Palermo.

Yes the statues in Palermo city were absolutely gorgeous! In Palermo we met some of my father’s family. The first time we met them we went to lunch… they can eat A LOT of fish… actually Sicilians can just eat A LOT :-P. They invited us to their house a few Sundays and wow, we could hardly move!!! They also took us around quite a few times (I promise I’ll get back to all of these things in more posts to come!). A few places was Mondello beach… I have to say I hadn’t ever seen so many people out and about, playing football, walking, or just sitting around… and it was almost dark!... and very cold … even for me :-P!

Another one was the cave were Saint Rosalia was found. It was very pretty, built into the mountain and had a big, open area where the rain water came in and was captured into little pipes along the walls which ended at the Holy water area. Pretty scary being inside though because of the way the rocks just jut out in random places so you don’t quite know how safe it is :-P!

I’m sure I’ll go into more detail about these places and put up a few images soon. Going to leave it at that, don’t want to make you all TOO bored :-P. Hope to hear from you all soon!

- Bianca

My Sicilian Adventure

2007-10-25T11:35:00.000+02:00

Hey everyone!

First off, I’ve decided this website isn’t just going to be about fishing (although that’s a big part of it :-P). Since I haven’t gone fishing lately (I was supposed to be going over the weekend… don’t quite know what happened there /:[ ) I haven’t got any fishing stories, so I’ll just zoom all the way back to the 1st of March when my adventures around the world really began.

If any of you have ever moved country you’ll know how difficult packing is! I had to bring my WHOLE life in just one suitcase! I’m not so great with throwing things out, quite a few times I kept packing arbitrary items… for instance pink, flower, fairy lights kept managing to find its own way in the suitcase… okay it was me… aww how I loved those… eventually though I replaced them with more… useful things after being persuaded by the fact that the plug sockets in Sicily would be different… it’s okay though taking them out freed up like half my suitcase :-P!

I also had to leave my (absolutely GORGEOUS) electric guitar which I’d only gotten 2 months earlier!!! That was so depressing, I WAS going to attempt bringing it as hand luggage but didn’t really want the hassle and it was SOOO heavy.

To get on with the story, grrr as I’m sure you can see I have a tendency to move onto a different subject and get distracted… Anyway, a few days before the 1st (which is when we departed Ireland) my gran, (I just call her Karen, so from now on I’m saying Karen) was staying with us and gave us the FRIGHT of our lives (I’m using us and our because my parents, sister, second cousin and my uncle were in the house at the time, with me of course :)).

I was in a deep sleep because I wanted to get a relatively early night, when I heard shouts and yells and stuff of MOM, MOM!. I ran downstairs, into the lounge expecting my gran to be doing something stupid instead my uncle and my dad were giving her C.P.R., later I found out she’d collapsed and her heart had stopped beating! The rugby was on that night so Karen must of just been over excited or something :-P, a few hours earlier she was jumping around cheering on her favourite team :-P… why was I on this story…?

Oh right yeah well Karen was supposed to be taking Gizmo (our small dog, I’m sure I’ve told you about him before) on the ferry with her, across to England there she would look after him at her house until we were settled in Sicily (since we just got up and left and didn’t bother finding a house first since someone, not saying anybody’s name in particular … usually people would put the persons name here and I’m very tempted to… but I won’t since I’m so, very nice :-P… said that it was easy enough to find a house there. This later proved as wrong :-P. See there I go again, off a different direction to the story… although this has got something to do with the story so I guess it’s not that bad…!

(Gizmo!!! The post looked very boring so thought I'd give you a glimpse of him :)! He's on the window sill at my gran's house, I think Gizmo spent too much of his time watching my uncle and aunt's cat... He's in England hints the fact that he's wearing a shirt :-P!)

I’ll continue with what I was saying, Karen came around and my parents rushed her to hospital, she’s all fine now though :). But she was supposed to be taking Gizmo on Tuesday, we were going to be leaving on Thursday. Gizmo and Karen’s departure was postponed until Saturday so I had to say goodbye to Gizmo and leave him behind with Karen and my great-gran (Maisey). It was so upsetting! I knew I wouldn’t see him for at least a month, an actual fact it was TWO!

And off our taxi took us (since we’d left our car with a friend who was going to sell it for us). We slept at the hotel across the road from Belfast International Airport, because our flight was at 08:00 am… FAAAAAAAAR too early for me :-P.

Somehow I managed to get up and be ready in the morning for my flight. My sister actually has some footage of us that morning… which I’ll have to find, most of the recording I was slouched over my suitcase on the floor of the hotel bedroom, moaning at her not to film me :-P! Venetia (my sister) did get some of the planes taking off though and you can see how early it is because of how dark it is outside!

Once we were all ready and had had breakfast we all crossed the road and checked in. Our first flight was very short and was surprisingly painless! Usually my ears pop… with a lot of pain going up and then coming down, despite my efforts to chew gum, or suck lollipops… sometimes I’d even try sleeping. We flew to Stansted in England first, sat around for a few hours, had lunch at a really nice Italian place, oh my word, the CHEESECAKE was the NICEST there it was so yummy!!!!

Once we only had about an hour of waiting to do we found out that our luggage was too heavy for the next flight to Palermo, Sicily! Quickly we sorted it out, I had to leave the coolest nail set ever behind, which I’d also only got two months earlier, it had an electric nail buffing machine!!!

We checked in again, and got on the plane to Palermo, my ears didn’t pop too painfully this time either, something in the day to be thankful about :-D!

After a few hours, the pilot landed the plane safely and we all got out, grabbed our luggage and walked around to the exit which came out onto one of the most Sicilian scenes that I’d ever seen… mainly because I’d only ever been to Sicily once and it was just for a day trip from Malta to Mount. Etna, to get there we had to go on one of the fastest catamarans in the world! Well anyway it was tonnes of black cabs parked outside with all of the taxi drivers dressed up like people from the “Mafia” with their leather jackets on and cigars or cigarettes hanging out of their mouths… yet, they weren’t standing around looking cool, or sitting in their cabs, they were playing football and yelling at each other in Sicilian… it was quite late already so the lighting just seemed to make everything a whole lot scarier :-P.

We managed to drag one of the taxi drivers away from his football, packed up our suitcases, buckled ourselves in and off we went. They drive like… CRAZY there! I was sitting in the middle at the back and just keeping my eye on the speedometer. Once we arrived at The Holiday Inn, the cab driver made us pay 60 euros for a five minute journey, so if you ever go to Sicily, I think it’s best to just hire a car out. We went inside only to find a miserable looking woman slouched in her seat at the reception. My dad used his broken Sicilian and asked if she had any rooms, she was reluctant at first, finally she gave us our key, and we went up stairs. At this moment, I just wanted to go right back to our home in Ireland. I had a bath, was reassured by my dad that I just needed a good night's sleep and I’d enjoy it more in the morning, so I went to bed.

Will continue with my Sicilian adventure tomorrow :-). Sorry this post had nothing to do with fishing.
Hope to hear from you all soon, still waiting on those pictures :-P.
- Bianca

2007-10-18T22:23:00.000+02:00

Thanks to Jake for letting me use this video of him kissing his pet fish! Hope you all enjoy it!

Randomly... random! O.o

2007-10-16T15:35:00.001+02:00

Hellooo again everyone!

Since I have no new news, I’ll give you some … stories… I’m not sure what they are going to be yet, myself, but I’ll just write and see what happens :-P!

Well living in Ireland was a lot of fun… yet very cold :-P. Nah in the summer it reached at least 20 degrees. When I was three (yes I know I’ve already told you this but that doesn’t mean I can’t give a more detailed… description :-P)!

Well when I was three years old we moved from Zimbabwe to Ireland, we had to leave because it was far too corrupt to live in anymore and my dad was a journalist which made it a whole lot more dangerous. Now the only reason we chose to move to Ireland out of the whole world was that my mom had lived there when she was younger for a short time in her life and my grandmother and great grandmother had been born there. So anyway we moved to southern Ireland first, I started school here for the first year, we stayed in southern Ireland for about three years, later moving to Northern Ireland, Belfast.

My parents quickly found my sister (who was about 10 now) and myself (I was six… aww how cute!!!) a primary school. I was so scared on the first day that I cried as soon as my parents left the classroom… the teacher moved me over to a desk where there where more children (I was sitting at one with… four at the beginning … it needed more people at it, well it did have five for a very short time…) and introduced me to two girls there Natalie and Lauren C. (not sisters their last names both just begin with C :-P), who have been my best friends since...

Anyway to carry on with what I was saying, I soon became friends with almost everyone in the class and stayed in Finaghy Primary School until the last day of primary seven (I’m not sure how this works out in any other countries but I was 11, if that helps).I moved onto Hunter House College, parting ways with a lot of my friends, a few months later my parents decided to start home-schooling my sister and I so I ended up parting ways with ALL of my friends. Although I did gather a get-together once in a while.

I’ve been home-schooled since and I’m very pleased that I started it or it wouldn’t be likely that I would be sitting in south-west France typing this now and I also wouldn’t have moved house a few months after beginning home schooling as to the limitlessness I had. Not having to live close to schools.It’s really strange to think of stuff like that :-S. Anyway, if you read the 5th post under this one, you’ll see how we came to get to France, don’t think that the people who have already read it would appreciate me repeating myself (something that I do often) :-P!

Ohhh! In France at the last house, we found out a secret that our dog (Gizmo, our shih-Tzu, which is a small dog, creepishly koala like, with a pigs tail, has more rows of teeth then any normal dog and hair instead of fur…) was keeping from us… HE LOVES FISHING! Well actually… he couldn’t be bothered with the fishing part, he just likes to take the fish back to the water and drop them in…

Sometimes this doesn’t go as smoothly as it sounds, sadly Gizmo was a little bit too rough with two tidlers (literally the size of my baby finger) and he didn’t bring them to the water soon enough… it’s okay though, my sister and I hummed a sad song… the fish just… floated away… one came back to life though :-D!!!

I have the tape somewhere I just need to edit it a slight touch :-P, he was better with the bigger fish, it was really funny, they kept slapping him in the face (well I wouldn’t like to be in Gizmo’s mouth either…).

Gizmo’s not so great with the fishing part because he’ll stand in the water, up to his stomach (which is right on the embankment… he has VERY short legs), and groan at the float. Sometimes he’ll get so annoyed that the fish aren’t biting he’ll start to bark and scratch at the water, flicking it up. A few times he chased the toads in the lake as well!

Ohhh my dad caught a toad once, it was pretty late and we were watching a baby toad eating flies at the edge of the river, so my dad got a piece of bait and put it on his hook, began waggling it around in front of the toad (about the size of my thumbnail) and it went for the bait! My dad quickly yanked the rod so the toad couldn’t latch on and get hooked. That was really funny!

Well I’m tired… and slightly hungry as well now so I’ll leave it at that! Hope to hear… and see :-P from you all soon! Thanks for reading (sorry it was a bit random today).

- Bianca

Last night... Dun dun DUNNNN!

2007-10-12T14:29:00.001+02:00

Hi Everybody!

I think that when my life gets that little bit boring (and I have nothing to write for Kiss My Fishy) life throws something, sometimes not so good…sometimes awesome, in my direction.

Well last night my parents, my sister and I were going out to dinner with my dad’s friend who’d come over from Ireland. It was all going great (especially my banana split, wow, the first time I’d had it and oooooh *drools*). Anyway, once we’d finished with dinner we took a stroll, about to go to our car but decided to go for drinks first instead (don’t worry, I just had pineapple juice :-P)… anyway, to carry on with my original story!

We walked my dad’s friend back to the hotel he was staying at “for a laugh” as he worded it. The reception was very pretty, filled with plants and statues of… stuff. We said our goodbyes and finally walked back to the car, laughing and joking, as you do.When we got there DISASTER struck! Dun dun DUNNN! No really though… The underground parking was LOCKED! And what’s worse was that our house keys were inside the car! We walked around to the back doors where you’re “supposed” to walk out of, here was the closing (and opening times), just 20 minutes after we’d parked the car, did the doors close (21:00). And they’d only open at 7 am. I know, stupid, eh?!

You see… we didn’t see the times because… okay this is so lazy… Greg (my dad’s friend) had been waiting by the fountain in the main square in town for us, and we couldn’t find any parking (because we thought the underground parking would’ve been closed at this time), so we’d driven around the square three times before finally giving in and trying out the underground parking.

We were surprised that it was still open (but we thought it would stay like that all night, once finding out that it was open now because it was all mechanical-ised) and so quickly finding a parking, ran up the ramp, that we’d driven down, instead of walking around the parking lot, finding the door, then walking up the stairs and then crossing the road, this sounds so much more complicated, you see. So the end result was that we didn’t see the times, wow, that was difficult to all get out!

If you’re from the U.K. or just don’t know what under ground parking is… even though it tell you pretty much in the name I will describe :-P. Basically it’s like those high-rise parking buildings, but that’s been squished down underground, I didn’t think anything strange of it when I’d first gone under, then realised that we weren’t driving up, we were going down. They’re really great, well they’re supposed to be, because it makes out that there’s not supposed to be many cars parked on the side of the roads… last night this proved as incorrect :-P!

So anyway… where was I with my original story… oh right, so we were LOCKED OUT of the parking lot, so we couldn’t drive home and even if we took a taxi home we wouldn’t be able to get into the house! We walked straight back to the hotel Greg was staying in, asked if they had rooms left, they were the least bit helpful, the guy looked in his little bookings book, looked up at us and said “Non”. Even though I saw keys hanging up :-P! He didn’t even lift the phone, or give us directions to another hotel!

We walked around for about 10 minutes, finally finding a hotel. We knocked on the knocker, heard heavy footsteps and a man answered the door. My dad told him our problem (in French) and the guy (I never caught his name so it’ll just be “the guy” for now :-P) ushered us in went over to his paper filled desk. Picked up the phone and began ringing other hotels, after two attempts I said with my, oh so wonderful French, I know I’m so modest, well it’s not that great but really came in handy here :-P.

Pensez-vous que la police peut… (Do you think that the police can…) he broke me off here, just nodding, dialled the police’s telephone number (17) spoke in rapid French , wrote a number down, hung up, phoned that number, spoke more and hung up again. Smiled, sat up from his seat, brought us outside, pointed and said that a person will come there and open it for us (yes, still in French) we thanked him and walked over to the area.

About 10 minutes later a guy in a GIANT black, zip up coat, walked over, half his face coved by the jacket, hands in pockets (very scary :-P). He asked us for the parking card, after some searching through my dads pockets, we realised I had it in my purse (give me some credit I was half asleep by this stage :-P). I handed it to the guy (didn’t catch his name either, so he’ll just be the new “the guy”) he took it, placed it in the machine, the lift opened we all squished into it, with “Whoops, was that all we had to do?”, we all felt absolutely terrible from getting this guy out of bed in the middle of the night. Anyway we went down in the lift, got out, walked over to the car, thanked him.

Got into the car drove to where you’d usually drive to get out, put the card into the machine there, the barrier went up and a few seconds later the iron gate lifted itself up and we drove home. My feet were killing me because I’d been wearing boots so my bed couldn’t have been more welcoming then it was.

I’m afraid to say that no new pictures have been coming through, despite my efforts at sending out tonnes of e-mails to fishing clubs :-P. So hopefully I will get a reply or something. The poll I put in seems to be going well though! Already 11 people have voted :-).

Okay, well I’ll leave it at that and I really do hope to hear from you all soon. For those of you, who have taken the time out to read my blog, thanks a million!

- Bianca

Carcassonne!

2007-10-10T11:38:00.002+02:00

Hey everyone!

I know :-O What?! TWO posts in ONE day! Well, I DID promise this one about Carcassonne on Monday!

Yes, so we went to Carcassonne yesterday, it was about an hours drive from our house. The scenery on the way was absolutely stunning! You have to drive up the twisting roads through The Black Mountains, there was a gorgeous, clear river that flowed to the right hand side of the road once we reached the city outside of Carcassonne, I don’t know where it came from though, might have dozed off for a few seconds :-P.

The most frustrating part in Carcassonne though, was being in the city outside of it, being able to see the towering castle, but not able to find the route to it! Not such great street signs ;-P! Yep, just blame the street signs! (Below - Carcassonne on a NICE day :-P).

It was well-worth it… once we found the entrance :-D! The best part was that I’m reading a book at the moment called “Labyrinth”, by Kate Mosse (not the David Bowie one with the kids that get lost in the labyrinth). And in it there’s a character from the 13th century (not too sure on the century, will look it up later in the book, wow, I’m impressed, just looked it up and I was right :-P) that lived in Carcassonne so you get more of a feel of what the castle and it’s grounds would have been like back then.

Anyway to get on with my ORIGINAL story, we walked through, have some pictures below of me standing in front of the entrance… holding a half eaten ice-cream :-P, (That's the second one)! (Top one - I'm the shortest one and wearing white :-P, my mom in the middle and my sister all the way to the left)

After looking around some “medieval” shops we came across “The Torture Chamber”. It’s like a museum of all of the torture… devices that they used on “heretics”, “witches”, and the “accused” in the olden days, the one date that I can actually remember was the first recorded date that they used “The Iron Maiden”, it was disgusting, that not even 500 years ago they STARTED using it (1515 A.D.). The Iron Maiden is like a sarcophagus that has long, I’d think very painful, nails on the inside, sticking out all over the show, the “accused” gets placed inside and the doors are slowly clamped over, it doesn’t do BRUTAL damage so the average person takes two whole days to die! It was so gross!!! Much worse things there too…

Afterward we walked around some more, ate, went to the BEST sweet shop EVER! Got ice-cream and walked around some more :-P! We drove home later, stopping by a gorgeous mountain valley, that over looked Hautpoul. (Below - Hautpoul)

Really hope to get some more (Wow! More sounds weird there :-P) fish pictures in sooooooon!

- Bianca

P.S. Yes I know, I thought I lived in south-west France too, but with this weather… pfft, it's okay though, it wasn't as bitterly cold as Ireland was :-D.

Not so lonely any more!!!

2007-10-10T10:02:00.000+02:00

Hey everyone!

I have some GREAT news!!! I received the first EVER picture from a fellow fisher all the way in Pennsylvania, USA (This is veeeeerrrrrryyyyy far for me :-P)!
So I’d like to say thank you very much Matt! This was taken about two or three years ago when Matt was 21 or 22, now Matt is 24 :-P.

I have some more people that have promised some pictures so as soon as those come through (hopefully soon, hint hint, nudge nudge, wink wink) I’ll post them straight on! When tonnes start coming in, I’m going to get a website built and have all of the pictures in photo albums on there :-) ...

I’d also like to thank Janice, in Alberta for trying to persuade everyone on the www.nlft.org forums to put up a picture of them kissing a fish in their avatar!

I hope to hear from everyone soon!

- Bianca

French stuff... I guess... you could call it that...

2007-10-08T17:39:00.001+02:00

Hey all again,

Well, not much news over here… none about fishing anyway. We’re all settling down very nicely in France, in the new house. We’ve even bought a new car with… a whole lot of frustration from me having to translate and the sales people not understanding… or usually me not understanding what they were trying to get across… eventually though we did it, and it was well worth it.

Tomorrow we’re taking a drive to Carcassone (a medieval city… somewhere in France, will get more details on it tomorrow or on Wednesday), with it. So will write about that afterwards and try get some pictures :-). On Sunday I found out that’s it’s only a five hour train journey to Paris from Toulouse, so that’s good to know… I guess :-P.

Oh! About two weeks ago, my sister (Venetia) and I made French friends… okay they made arrangements to meet up with us the next day in town, but they didn’t pitch up :-O!!! Okay well I think we got lost in translation… Still haven’t seen them around, but on the first day that we met, they took us to a little square, beside the park in town.

Here there were tonnes of kids dancing, they called this type of dance “Tecktonik” (Whew, that is the way to spell it, I used to have it as Techtonique... looks French enough :-P... but was wrong >.<). It’s … quite different to British dancing... Tecktonik is like loads of arm movements and twisty leg movements, some jelly body movements as well, (wow, now you can REALLY imagine what I’m trying to describe :-P).

At the beginning Venetia and I thought of it as strange, but after watching some videos on youtube, I think it doesn’t look… too bad :-P, and want to learn it… so far I can do… one move… and it’s a very simple one (most of the time I can’t even get my hands right with it >.<). Hee hee! The girl who does break dancing even said it was more difficult than that, so I don’t feel that bad about it :-P!

How sad am I?... Actually don't answer that, it's just a rhetorical question :-P. I have absolutely no other news… wow I need to get a lake! :-P Hope to hear from you all soon!

- Bianca

How we came to be so far across the pond! (Ireland to France)

2007-10-04T13:43:00.001+02:00

Hey everyone!

Well on the first of September, we moved to our permanent house in France. About time too, you see… moving about all began a VERY long time ago (well.. 6 months on the first… but that seems like a very long time to me, so just let me have my rant!)… So on the 1st of March 2007, we departed Ireland only after deciding 6 weeks earlier that we were going to move to Sicily. Yep, that’s right not France, Sicily (confused, eh? :P)! My dad’s dad had lived there, and Ireland was so cold, EVERY single day it was like “What’s the day like?” “Umm… rainy and cold…” on and on and on.

We’re not used to cold weather (I’ll get to that part later). So we all made a decision to give it a go, (for those of you that never concentrated in Geography classes, Sicily is the football of the boot (the boot being Italy), it’s also know as “The Land of the Mafia”… actually I just made that last bit up, but it is where “The Mafia” originated from, with only ever visiting it once.

So you’re wondering how we ended up in south-west France? After having a lot of bad experiences there, my dad got a job offer in France and so he accepted. I left Sicily after living in it for two months and flew all the way up North, just stopping short of Northern Ireland in South England. We came here first because my cousins live there and it would give us more time to find a decent place in France.

One month later we left and after only finding a “gite” – like a summer house (that’s where the lake was and where the pictures below were taken at) – we arrived in our hopefully last destination… for a while! Then of course we moved to this new house. Sadly it has no lake near it :-(, but it is very nice and only five minutes from town, an hour from skiing in the Pyrenees and an hour and a half’s drive from the Mediterranean :-)!

We’ve been living here for a month and the fishing withdrawal symptoms are starting to set in! I find that when a bar of soap drops in the shower, I’m mildly surprised it doesn’t flop around for a bit, before becoming still!

Oh right yeah, just read through above and realised that I forgot to tell you why we’re not used to the cold weather, well we (my mom, dad, sister and of course myself) were all born in Zimbabwe, Africa, I was three when the country became too corrupt to live in and we had to leave for Ireland. Right well, I’m away until next write up :-).

Hope to hear comments SOON :-P!

- Bianca

O-FISHAL RANT!

2007-07-08T17:22:00.001+02:00

Okay so… Hey everyone! Welcome to Kiss My Fishy the Oh-fish-all Website (ha ha, how funny am I?… actually, don’t answer that :-P)!!!

I know kissing a fish doesn’t sound so great…and doesn’t taste so FLY (wait that’s a frog joke right?...) either. But I had to… well I was willing to, but only because it WAS a bet. I have no secret life :-P.

Well to start off, we start from the most obvious place, the end. I kissed a fish! Yes I’m sure you can tell by now because of the name, the WHOLE site and of course the pictures (Yep that’s me)!

My name’s Bianca Cassandra P. I’m 13… and 7 months (oooh how precise)! And yep I kissed a fish (wow…. I’m very repetitive, repetitive, repetitive)… Well recently we (my mom, my dad, my sister and my dog) moved to South-west of France. We’d been living in Ireland for 10 years before and have only been living in France for 3 months now.

On one day in the second month of being here, my dad and I went down to the lake, that’s about 5 minutes walk from the house, to go fishing. Usually I ROCK at fishing… but this night was different /:-O… Dun dun DUNNN! No really, in two or so hours of fishing we’d catch a few, one night my mom and I even caught at least 20 (Of course we always throw the fish back… so it could’ve been the same fish, latching onto the bait, getting pulled in, taken off the hook, thrown back in, swimming around for a few minutes, saw that giant blob of orange again, got caught, reeled in, unhooked, thrown back in and so on and so on and so on)!!!

Like I was saying, this night was different, my dad and I hadn’t caught any yet and we’d moved up and down the lake and had been fishing for at least a good half-hour (good for the fish anyway ;-P). So my dad came up with a game. Who ever caught the first fish of the night, no matter what the size (even though in these pictures this fish is the general size of the catch we catch) the other person would have to kiss it.

Well the first fish was caught by… drum roll please… my dad! Hints, who’s kissing the fish in the pictures… me! So my mom got the camera set up and…I kissed a fish!
It was DISGUSTING! The fish actually SUCKED my lip… Something I NEVER want to do again… but here’s my idea…

I would really love it if…. all of you readers who love to fish would kiss a fish for me and then send in your pictures. If you get a group of your fishing friends to go for a group-fishing trip then whoever catches the first fish, the rest MUST kiss it and you take the pictures!
Please ensure that the fish you are about to kiss does NOT have teeth!

As I’ve told you before we’re living in France now and I seldom hear English so all comments would be much appreciated…

Thanks, now start that FISHING FRENZY and get HOOKED on making your friends kiss your fishy!

- Bianca

P.S. You can send your pictures to kissmyfishy@gmail.com