You may have noticed that I haven't discussed doing any scanning for the past couple of weeks. There's a reason. The company I was doing the scanning for has failed to make the payments that they set out in an e-mail back in March. Some of my invoices are now a year old and I cannot get a response from anyone I have tried to contact.
Clearly something is up with the company and has been for some time. The copyright holder to the work I have been doing is aware of the situation, but that doesn't translate into money in the bank. So I'm working on things that will help my flagging bank balance. Rent must be paid, bills must be paid, food must be put on the table and I need new glasses. If I was paid the money owed, it would mean I could complete the next Bear Alley Books comic history project. At the moment I can't.
So you might be seeing some comics and stuff turning up on eBay while I try to sort this out.
Enough of that.
I have spent the week doing a it of revision on The Trials Of Hank Janson. To those of you new to Hank, the book chronicles how an author was cheated out of money by his publisher and spent the rest of his days trying to recover from the blow. The book has been out of print for a year or two and is currently available on Amazon for between £32 and £109. I should have an new edition out at a substantial saving on those prices in the not-too-distant future.
I'm also thinking of doing a companion publication that I can print in colour so that you get to see some of the covers related to 'Hank' and the author behind 'him', Steve Frances, who also wrote many other books. I'm still trying to work out the details — I haven't had much spare time this week — but I'll let everyone know when I've figured out what I'm doing.
Bizarrely, and for the first time in my life, I have been enjoying tidying up the garden. The last time I mentioned this, we were having a tree taken down; since then I have been digging out weeds and trying to grow grass in their place.
Back in April we had a huge problem with a green alkanet, a common wildflower that was starting to take over the garden. It had driven back the lawn by at least two feet and had swamped the area around the pond in the back garden. You'll see from these photos...
... how things have been progressing. First pic from April, second from May, and the third from June. I have been watering the new grass daily, which is why it looks so much greener than the rest of the lawn. I still need to dig out some of the weeds that managed to survive the cull, and seed some of the areas that are still a bit patchy, but I'm rather pleased with the way things have been going.
The are around the pond was a much bigger prospect, but I'm under doctor's orders to get some more vitamin D, and the recent spell of gorgeous sunny days — hot without being muggy — gave me the impetus to attack the jungle.
I spread the work over a couple of days, revising The Trials Of Hank Janson for an hour and then nipping out into the garden for ten or twenty minutes. It's keeping my stress levels manageable, my blood pressure down, gives my eyes a rest from the computer and my brain time to think about the book and what needs doing to it. Win, win, win, win.
And here's the results...
... the first photo from May, the second from yesterday (Thursday, 22 June). I've sown a whole box of grass seed and I'm keeping the area watered. Nothing showing yet, but it has only been a few days.
The one disappointment was my plans for the back end of the garden. For the first two yards at the front of the fence is a carpet of ivy that managed to keep even the green alkanet at bay. So my plan was to tear up the ivy and seed that area with wild flowers — we try to be as bee- and butterfly-friendly as we can — so I asked Mel to pick up some seed. I was guessing that, as the boxes of grass seed was about £4, the wild flowers would be roughly the same, so I asked for £4 worth.
The four packets that came back looked quite substantial, each over 5 inches in height, but when I opened them, the seeds were a few grains at the bottom of the packet. If I scattered them in the same way as I had scattered the grass seed (35g per square metre recommended) it would have cost me a fortune. So that plan is on hold until I can figure out whether to just put grass down or I can find a source of cheap wild flower seeds.
I have received some excellent books over the past couple of days, plus my copy of the Frost* Island Live Blu-ray/2CD set, plus a bonus CD and a postcard signed by the inimitable Jem Godfrey. So that's the end of gardening news as I need to get this into the Blu-ray player without delay.
[[UPDATE: It's fantastic!]]
(* I'm still trying to solve this mystery: the cover for Auctioned is by Reg Heade, but the second cover, Persian Pride, is by another artist who has clearly taken some inspiration from the earlier cover. This second artist has never been identified; I think it's the same artist who did the Alexander Moring HJ covers, but I'd appreciate anyone's thoughts.)
No comments:
Post a Comment