It's all go.

I am now firmly entrenched in the wonderful Shake the Dust initiative as a poet shadow working with the marvellous Alfie Crow, and though we haven't gone into the school yet (first session on Tuesday!) I am already excited to be a part of it all. In fact, I've just spent the last hour reciting a poem in order to memorise it for performance - for the first time ever. I'm quite excited and scared about the prospect of freezing and forgetting everything at an inopportune moment, but hopefully the story of the poem and the mental map I've sort of created as I've been doing it will help.

Actually, no, who am I kidding. Memorising and reciting a poem isn't something I've done since I was about 10. I'm terrified! And to test this new practice in front of 150 12/13 year olds?! Oh my. Ohhhh my.

Talking of new experiences, I am also in the process of creating my own website! I've picked up quite a bit of html over the years, enough to decipher and amend pages and make existing designs do what I want, but I'm determined to build an xhtml and CSS website from scratch this time, so it's a very steep learning curve to get things looking how I want. Even though all I want is to keep things very simple! There's something very satisfying about learning it on the fly and getting links to change colour when you hover on them, or moving your sidebar so it floats left and leaves enough room for the main content to appear next to it.... no? Just me? Oh well...

In other news, I am getting rats at the beginning of March! Squee!