It’s amazing what a small monkey can acheive with gaffa tape, scissors and some garish purple waterproof weird stuff.

Santa brought me a new bag for Crimbo, but it’s one of them there ones with a zip along the top and gappy bits at the ends and it’s rained and snowed and sleeted and rained ever since.   I took some inspiration from Craft magazine and fashioned (and I really do think fashion is the appropriate word to use for something so incredibly styling) a poncho for my bag.

BEHOLD!

There were some who said it couldn’t be done.  There were some who said it shouldn’t.  But they’re all dead now and I have a lovely dry bag.

The best bit is I can still get to the innards when the bagcho is attached.

I didn’t have any sort of a pattern, and I usually don’t get on terribly well with sticky things, so I’m jolly pleased with myself.  The whole thing took under an hour and I didn’t need rescuing and it went right the first time.

I have loads of fabric lef.  Probably enough to make another three bagchos, but I have no other bags that need them so I might start randomly wrapping things in the house, and it only cost £3.25.  My mum would be so proud.  Maybe I should phone her, but I’m not sure I could convey the magnitude of my AWESOME ABILITIES over the phone.

Don’t let that last photo fool you.  It’s definitely purple.

I have a Tree House to paint. :o(

I’m mostly back now and I brought a little friend!

I’m not sure having a dead mouse glued to the wall gave the best impression to the kitchen fitters, and they made a point of leaving him there for us to peel off ourselves.  Apparently mouse removal was not included in the price.   With recession looming large, you’d think tradespeople would be a little keener to please their customers.

I’m sure you’re aware you missed my birthday too.  It’s ok though.  You can get me a better present for Crimbo and I’ll let you off the hook.  Otherwise the hook stays in and you can keep swinging for another month.

Look what I got though!

Just so you don’t miss out on the HILARIOUS pun, those are FREUDIAN SLIPPERS! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!  There’s some pirate cutlassery, a remote controlled zombie (could have done with him when I needed that mouse eating), Bag Style, a book to collect my Precious Thoughts in, the first series of Old Harry’s Game, a new red DS, and in the middle is some laceweight that’s going to become these, and a bunch of stuff that turned up after I took the photo.  Ooh, I got weird sweeties that mess with your taste buds.  I’m thinking of hiding some in the Crimbo dinner.  Maybe they’ll make sprouts bearable.

So Giftmass is coming, but I can’t be arsed with knitting presents this year, so I’m going to pretend to be poor and get away with some cheaparse presents and everyone buying me lovely stuff to cheer me up.  I hope no one I’m related to reads the blog.

I did knit this for the Crimbo party though.

It’s the two toned shrug from fitted knits, but with Rowan Shimmer in the ribbing to make me look all glam.  It’s pretty stretchy so I should be able to hide a fair few sausage rolls down the sleeves.  I’m going to avoid raiding the cheese and pineapple hedgehog after an unfortunate incident last year involving a cocktail stick and the Spanish Ambassador.  I was able to pay him off with a box of Ferrero Rocher, but it was a close call, and I’m not made of rice crispies.  I wish I was.  It would be awesome to be that crunchy.  A bit risky at the seaside though what with the ever present threat of seagulls.  I’ve heard you can explode birds with rice, but does that work if it’s already popped?  Probably not, and I’d not want to lose my leg for the sake of experiment.

I spent some of my birthday pennies on some of that there self striping Fyberspates malarky.

I think it might be witchcraft.

You get buggering loads of it.  I had enough for socks and a dreamswatch headscarf.  It makes me look like a flowerpower hippy, so I haven’t worn it to work yet.  They have an impression of me as being a tiny bit scary and unhinged and I don’t want to ruin that by having them think I like peace and hugging.  They might try and touch me and then I’d have to cut them, and that always leads to awkward social situations and screaming.

We went to the Interknit Cafe on my birthday, and as a special treat the Professor let me buy him some yarn so I could make him a hat.  I’m terribly spoiled.

Do you know, that furry bugger still hasn’t made me my birthday cake?

The only other thing I can remember that I made was a scarf from some alpaca that I think came from Peru or somewhere.  I don’t know.  I don’t care anymore.  It’s not important.

It’s this one, without the fringe and in fuzzier yarn, but otherwise identical.  Apart from the colour.

Now.  If you’re in Blighty, have you seen those Trevor Sorbie ads for the hairdryer with the stuff you put in that does something or other to your hair and he wants everyone to buy them and be shiny?

Right.  Well look at this and then ask yourself if you really want to coat your hair in whatever it is he’s pushing.

No.  I didn’t think so.  Probably what happens is when enough people have shiny hair a chain reaction is set off that blows up Paris.  So very predictable.  Blofeld/Blowdryer.  Does he take us all for fools?

Have you ever known fear?  The cold shiver up your spine.  Icy fingers squeezing your heart and slowly tightening their grip until your vision goes black and you fall into a swirling abyss of horror.  All you can hear are the screams of lost souls, and the loudest scream of all is your own.

I have know that fear.  And it has a name.

Blackgang Chine.

Oh sure, they make out they’re all jolly and fun on their little leaflet, but don’t be taken in by their lies.  Beyond their gates lies nothing but horror and death.  Also gnomes.  Awful gnomes with dead, staring eyes.

It all starts out innocently enough.  There’s a maze you can’t get lost in, and a rollercoaster that travels at a heady 35mph, which the island children assured me was terrifying.  They were wrong.  The terror was yet to come.

It began in the Blackgang sawmill.  There were engines and waterwheelies and the comforting smell of engine oil.  We skipped and tripped through the exhibits.

They had awesome anvils.

Plenty of dead people, stuffed and arranged into interesting poses.

They even had wheelie deelies.  We thought we were safe.  We were wrong.  Just around the corner was a world of lies, horror and atrocious spelling mistakes.

Fur?  FUR?  That’s not fur!  THAT IS WOOD!

Where’s the sand?  Where’s the sea?  It’s not a bloody beach, it’s quite clearly a tree!

I was getting pretty riled by this point, as I’m sure you can imagine.  But we had barely scratched the surface of the tip of the iceberg of doom.

This is a whale.  I’m sure it looks innocent enough to you, but you don’t know the half of it.  They expect you to walk in through the whale’s mouth LIKE A FOOL!  And what happens when you’re in there?  IT SQUIRTS YOU!  And then you come out through its arse and you’re wet with whale juice.  AS WET AS A WHALE’S BELLY!  Is that any way to treat a paying customer?

This is Brian.  He hides in the woods and touches people as they walk past.  Parents!  Do not let your children lick his mushroom.

Ne’er do wells lurk around every corner.  This chap reckoned he was hard.  Well he’s dead now and I have no regrets.

This is where we stumbled into the house of a well to do chap who wanted to eat us.  A wittier monkey might call him a dinnersaur.  Not me though.  I like to refer to him as WTF?!??!

It was at this point that I stopped taking photos, so you’ll just have to take my word for the rest of it.  It was the cowboy town that did for me.  Or rather it was the smell of the cowboy town.  We decided to leave as quickly as possible but we were very lost indeed.  There was a giant snakes and ladders set that was steeper than the steepest thing, and we knew it was purest folly to play.  So we went past that and found a freakass scary castle.  We ran.  And ended up back at the snakes and ladders.  We ran again.  And ended up back at the snakes and ladders.

There were more dinosaurs.  Giant scary butterflies and then there was this weather wizard thing with music and goblins and I think that was when I passed out.  When I woke up there was a man dancing on the floor and the floor made the music and there were mirrors that made me look funny and made my belly feel sick like Satan was playing with my kidneys and there was a crooked house and demons lived there and they wanted to eat my soul and I ran and I ran and I couldn’t get out and then all of a sudden there was the giant smuggler and I ran through his legs and back to the car but I couldn’t see the Professor and I didn’t know where he was and then there was screaming and everything went black.

I woke up back at the hotel and the Professor was there and he didn’t remember anything.  If I mention smugglers or dinosaurs he starts to shake and rock back and forth and it was horrible and if you love your sanity you’ll stay away from that land of horror.

Ahh summer. The time of year that a monkey’s thoughts turn to fudge and crazy golf (eight different courses so far this year. Beat that suckers!).

It’s not easy being a three inch monkey in a six foot world, so this year the Professor booked a surprised holibag in a special town for midgets! We flew in to the local airport, but we’re still not sure where our luggage went.

Our hotel was but a short train ride away. The local export is speciality meat. Please do not be disturbed by the graphic scenes of a locomotive nature. We all have our livings to make, and it’s not for us enlightened types to judge the primitives and their barbaric ways.

It didn’t take us long to get settled in our hotel, though there was a strange smell of rendered pterodactyl meat on the air.

You may rest assured that though the cake shop was monkey sized…

…the portions were as they should be.

The locals threw us a welcome concert that evening. It’s not often they get such modest, glossy and heroic monkeys as me visiting their squalid little town, so it’s right and proper that they showed their appreciation.

You may rest assured that I have many holibag adventures to share with you, including a SHOCKING time at the donkey sanctuary.

But those are tales for another day.

This is the Moonlight Sonata shawl in Posh Yarn lace club blue stuff from many moons ago.

It lives with the holibag bunny sitter now. The Professor was all for wiping her brain and dumping her listless body out on the moors lest she divulge the secrets of his lab to the world, but I thought that might come off as a little ungrateful.

Besides, if we did anything to her just after we got back it might look suspicious. Better to wait and kill her in the autumn see how the situation develops.

Move along please.

It’s that time of year when knitting must be forsaken in order to do important works in the garden.  By which I mean, falling asleep in a deck chair.  I surely can’t be alone in not wanting to sit with a pile of alpaca on my lap when the mercury starts rising?

The good thing about the sun coming out is it encourages me to stop eating wintery stodge and get back to healthy eating.

What?  It’s banana chocolate.  That’s a sort of fruit.

NOM NOMS!

Of course, the tricky part is matching things up with the invoice. And with the Professor being vegetarian and the ingredients lists being all squigalicious I’m afraid I’ll have to eat it all myself. It’s a real burden.

The pickles are entirely vegetarian as far as I’m aware, but I don’t care. He’s not getting any. I like my pickles.

The bright colours is how you know they’re good for you.

‘Not more socks, Super Monkey!’

Yes! More sodding socks.

Stansfield something or other.

Marigold socks.

Plain old stripy red socks.

You can probably guess that I needed a break from socks. So I went on a mission. A pickle mission. I don’t know what the other people in the yarn shop thought of us as the Professor pointed at yarn and I yelled back ‘NO! Not pickly enough!’ and I don’t much care. Pickles are important.

So there you have it. Debbie Bliss Donegal Tweed. Officially the most pickly yarn in existence. And here we have the most pickly hat.

You might think that with all my powers that a few socks and a pickle hat wouldn’t be nearly enough to occupy my MIGHTY INTELLECT, and you would be quite correct.  Have a gold star.

I have been sewing.  I have all my patches ready to join together into a quilt before I sort out the border.  I plan to make a start on The Great Assembling today, but mostly I’ve been procrastinating.  I’m feeling fairly confident that I’m not insane to do it all by hand since reading this…

There are some stunning quilts in there, and I might be brave enough to try one next but there’s a lot of brain work involved in working out what different fabrics to use and I’m still a bit scared.

I have received tribute for the socks I sent off to Mogiebear.

The chocolates arrived intact with no evidence of tampering.  This is a better behaved monkey than I’m used to.  I was thinking his name should be Baron Samedi, but the Professor tells me he’s a zombie pirate.  I’m not so sure.  I reckon he has more of the voodoo about him than the peg leg.

I have also been etsy shopping a teeny tiny bit.

Spooky stitch markers.  Wooooooooooooooooooo.

And Jack Skellington earrings from Viking Knits.  Fear my lobes!

And now I think I’ll have lunch, play some Guitar Hero or My Sims and then maybe it will be too late to start working on my quilt.  Hurrah!

You know when you go to bed and your paws smell of bacon but you didn’t have any bacon and there’s no bacon in the house and you don’t know why you smell of bacon and you can’t get to sleep for thinking about bacon? Well, apparently you shouldn’t mention it to anyone else. Especially not the bit where you try the scratch and sniff method to work out where the bacon smell originally came from.

Moving on. I won another award! My second of the year, but it won’t be the last. My Eurovision preparation is picking up speed. I figure I can use the drugs to bribe the judges. This time it turns out I make Tan’s day. And why not? Show me one person who doesn’t like a sticky monkey and I’ll beat them to death with a whisk and I’ll show you their entrails a person with no hope of surviving the night joy in their belly.

I’m supposed to find ten blogs and do the same to them. Whoever came up with this idea wasn’t expecting someone as lazy as me to get involved. But I’m not going to do that thing where you tell everyone that’s reading that they should consider themselves nominated because that is LAME and you’re not. I don’t know who you are and quite frankly you could be the most rubbage person in the universe. THAT’S RIGHT DR DEMONICO! I’M TALKING TO YOU!

So here’s how it’s going to work. Firstly, I’m changing the award to something more meaningful.

Then I’m going to go and check my bloglines deely for sticky people. Some people find it hard to determine how sticky a person is just from words on a screen, but I have a radar for sticky. The Professor built it for me. It’s pink.

Spanner is the tallest cow in the world and can destroy whole universes with her farts. You can’t have any of the pictures I bagsied and the Eiffel Tower series is destined for the tree house hallway. Anyway, one time she beat up The Jolly Green Giant and stole all his sweetcorn to make jam with. True story.

Who among you could deny the sticky nature of the monkee? Again, I’m looking at you Dr Demonico. It’s actually an urban myth, or a jungle myth mebbe, that monkeys are ace climbers. They just have really sticky paws and use their natural tacky nature to cling to trees and the reason they fling poo is because it sticks to their bums and they have to pull it off with their sticky paws and then flick their paws to get it off them. FACT.

Erm. This bloke cleans up a lot of puke so he must be pretty sticky, right? I think I need to put some new batteries in my radar. Hang on…OI! This is just an egg box with a dead squirrel in it!

So last night, as the Professor was taping me into my hammock, we got to talking about how long each of us would survive in your standard zombie mutant chainsaw killer apocalypse scenario. The Professor reckons he’d die straight away to get it over with before the terror began. I think that might be a tad foolish. The first death is always the most gruesome and drawn out so as to set the scene for horrors to come. I think the tipping point between terror and pain is probably death number 3 where the corpse is usually discovered dangling from a tree with no explanation as to how it got there.

I couldn’t decided if I’d be the one who made it to the end, or the brave little monkey who sacrificed herself so that others might live and so that I got to do some ace fighting with high kicks and crowbars and bullet time and stuff.  Also, I’d quite like to drop to my knees at one point and yell ‘NOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooo……………’ whilst waggling my fist at an uncaring universe.  That was when the Professor said ‘Silly Super Monkey. You’re the scary monster that’s doing all the killing.’

Poor me.

Do you ever have one of those days where you type and type and type and never really say anything and there’s no one about to make you stop?

I might stop now.

It’s the new year and I am officially* the funnestest of ever. Funnestest means most ultimately awesome and bestest smelling. It would be churlish of me to deny it, and so I won’t.

*not official.

It seems a popular thing to do to be writing a plan of action for the coming year. Of course, back on Planet Donkey! Monkey! the new year doesn’t begin for another fortnight, and then there’s another one the week after that, and then I think the next one is in three years time. We have a somewhat erratic orbit since Dr Demonico unleashed his gravity conkers prompting the 100 Year Bouncy War. That was certainly an exciting couple of weeks and no mistake. I shall, however, comply with this quaint custom so as to better blend in with the puny Earth type humans and their silly ideas.

1. I will take affirmative action in my plans to take over this pathetic planet. I will write a chart topping song with a toe tapping beat and finally win Eurovision. My scheme last year was thrown into disarray by those filty deodorant swines stealing part of my chorus, but I believe that boom bing a bang bang may prove to be a stronger line than boom chick a wah wah anyway. In any case I will destroy my enemies and crush their wills beneath my adorable furry fists. May the best monkey win, i.e. me.

2. I will purchase a volcanic island and have the Professor kit it out with lasers and a monorail and one of those openy closey metal shutter deelies for the roof. Plus anything else that occurs to me. I want it to be really swanky, you know? The sort of place you won’t be embarrassed to kill spies in, but that you can still invite your mum round to for a cup of tea. Maybe some throw cushions and a shark tank.

I’ve been looking around the available real estate and it’s really expensive stuff. It leads me to believe that super villains aren’t as bad as they’re made out to be. I mean, if you’d just spent all that money to buy your island, do it up and recruit all those minions, where would you then find the cash to buy all the diamonds you need for your space laser? They have no choice but to resort to crime to fund their capers and I don’t think they should be judged badly. It’s the messed up property prices that are to blame.

It also explains why the minions are dressed in orange jumpsuits. There’s no money left for outfits and fabric can be really expensive. I bet Blofeld was always stroking his pussy as a way to soothe his sore fingers from all that sewing. If Bond had only thought to buy him a thimble I’m sure a lot of that rage could have been dissipated.

3. Make more me time. I think a good start would be somewhere in the range of 30 hours a day. This may require some sort of time dilation device to acheive. I’ll have to discuss it with the Professor.

4. I will suffer 20% fewer fools gladly.

Now for the important part. CRIMBO PRESSIES!

There’s Guitar Hero for the Wii at which I totally frigging ROCK! Some piratey stickers and colouring in. I’m pretty good at that but sometimes I go over the lines. The Professor says I should just relax and have fun with it, but I don’t know. The lines wouldn’t be there if they weren’t important, would they?

There are chocolate sausages and a praline slab that I haven’t eaten yet. Well, ok, one of the sausages is gone. I’ve put in some empty wrappers to symbolise all the things that didn’t make it to the photo session. My memory is hazy from all the sugar but I think there was quite a quantity. But there’s more left in the cupboard so there’s no need to panic.

The dinosauruses are from a quilt kit. I’ve already begun the cutting into pieces. I’m pretty nifty with scissors, it’s the sewing that causes conniptions. I got a big sewing box from my mum, so I’m all tooled up for the job but it WILL all go horribly and hilariously wrong. The only question is how and when. Except that’s two questions.

Then some books. I started the zombie book last night in my hammock, but it made me hungry. I’m not sure that’s a good thing. There was another book too on sewing bags, but I’ve put that somewhere safe. It doesn’t make me hungry.

The war of the worlds tripod is my gorilla pod. It means I can take those really arty shots that you see on all the fancy blogs.

There’s probably some other stuff that’s not there, besides all the edible stuff (the biscuits were lovely Badger), but I haven’t had breakfast yet and the sewing stuff would make more sense if I’d mentioned I got a sewing machine for my birthday, but my mum only handed that over a couple of weeks before Crimbo.

Now, shall I have peanut butter on toast or cereal? Or maybe noodles seeing as it’s lunch time? There’s a chocolate pudding and some clotted cream in the fridge. Maybe I’ll have that…