Yes, Uncle Bear has been away from you for a very long time. *hangs head in shame*
Will I even be able to post to you? It did take a crack team of code breakers to even work out how to sign in again.
But I have tales for you. Special stories for wee cubs with short twitter length attentions spans. Tweeting them first but then telling them to you, my dear old blog. Hope you enjoy Uncle Bear's Bedtime Tales For Teddy Bears :o)
I sat very still & tried to think "what would Simon Pegg & Nick Frost do?" I had been doing some very important staring & wondering & was caught unprepared.
Sure enough she had been very pasty faced recently & often stumbled about moaning & groaning. I hadn't noticed. I was a very bad but very busy bear.
She only calls me Teddy when she's angry or gloomy.
"Teddy, I can't sleep. Do you have a hug for your old madame?"
She wanted me close so she could munch me like a toffee doughnut. A sad end to the life of an amazing bear.
"I'm too wonderful to die in the paws of the evil walking dead". Oops. Did I say that out loud?
"Quite" she said "but what about my insomnia?" & she prodded me with her sleep diary.
Hello little blog. I am a bad & naughty blog bear. I have been lured away by the shiny that is Twitter.
We got one of those smartypants phones & discovered we could tweet from exciting & exotic locations like under the quilt or Fife. Got to go to pawpawties & take part in world tours & spend evenings at nipclub.
Poor little blog - you just couldn't keep up. But we've found this app thing. Not sure if it will work. Let's see :o)
Hello little blog! More neglect. Busy bear. Easier to Twitter when I'm out and about. Or hiding under the covers. We're having a tough old year so quite a lot of hiding under the covers is happening. I am thinking about retraining as a tractor driver - how do I look?
Busy February. Proud to represent Scotland in the Teddy Olympics. Managed to collect bronze in Peek-A-Boo, silver in Dabbling and Eye To Eye, and - extremely proud of this - gold in the Balltastic event ...
Bit disappointed that Partick Thistle haven't been in touch. Maybe they're worried that I'll cost too much now I'm an olympic star.
Ah, well. Don't know what happened in the human olympics but the teddy olympics were very well organised by a great team of toys - Olly Ted, Spencer Teddy and the rest of the gang.
Must be the award season. The lovely Frugal Dougal got on the shortlist for a Shorty for his charity work. Just missed out on first place but still top dog - and full marks to his staff for that Dougal costume so that they could represent him properly in New York. Brilliant!
Excellent news from the Grammys - once I got over my disappointment that it wasn't an special award ceremony for grannies and grandmas - Mr Ramblin' Jack Elliot got the award for best traditional blues album.
And in the post today ...
... thanks to my mate Spud - now available in Twitter size as Spudacious - and his wonderful Hillbillie.
Madame has been up to stuff too. Coughing. Thatfilmfestivalthing. Messing about with phones. Doing stuff with wool and *shudder* that mofluff stuff. More coughing. I blame the mofluff. The mo should keep that fluff to themselves.
All I want now is that spring to hurry up and arrive. Liked the snow. Not so keen on ice and slush and sharing the bed with freezy cold feet. Ready for snowdrops and daylight and goodbye to bed socks.
So I work from home and maybe it does look like I'm just lounging about in bed all day, staring in to space and doing nowt. I'll have you know that the life of a small bear is full of trauma and angst. I have to protect the pyjamas from pyjama thieves and something horrible could happen to those pillows if I wasn't here to keep them in their place. And looking after Madame. That is a whole heap of hard work.
I haven't had much time for hobbies. She has her knitting and moaning about things.
I did have the rally driving but having to give that up now that my navigator has gone off to California to hunt jackalopes.
Got some new coloured pencils recently. Would be nice to do a bit of drawing but they are rather smart Muppet pencils. All lovely in a Fozzie Bear tin. Don't want to waste their loveliness.
What to do? tum te tum
Hang on. This looks promising. Dude Craft! I'm a crafty dude.
And here it is - the perfect hobby. I just have to roll under the bed and I'll have everything I need for dust bunny sculpture.
It's a nice thought. Midwinter. I don't why. I just like it. In the deep midwinter and all that. I'm not so keen on plain old winter. That's just dull and dark and cold and wet and gloomy. But a proper bit of midwinter - that light you only get when it snows and bright frosty air that makes me snout tingle and makes me think that all kinds of things might be possible. Right at the middle of it all and knowing that the days will slowly be getting longer again.
Then again I don't have much of a commute - one side of the bed to the other - and I have never fallen bump, bump, bump down slidey snow covered stone steps.
Would have been bad if Coco had been stuck up here. It was lovely to see him but he had to travel home to Essex. He was incredibly brave and travelled all by himself by Royal Mail Special Delivery. We had a Postman Pat voodoo doll ready but he actually arrived ahead of schedule. Be nice to go and visit him sometime but I think I'd take Madame and she is too big to fit in an envelope so we would probably have to go by bus or train. Do they have buses and trains in Essex? I think Coco gets chauffeured everywhere, what with him being royal. I really need to look at a map. I do know that Essex is Down South Somewhere but so, I believe, are a lot of places.
And now it's just her and me again. We have a new bed with a wibbly wobbly mattress. We have new pillows. Less wibbly wobbly. A new oven. Not wibbly or wobbly. A big exciting pile of new books to look at. She has some wool to play with. She has a lot of wool to play with. And other types of yarn. There are a few presents to unwrap. Pyjamas and hot water bottles ready. A few lovely days of mooching before we head off to see various People and Cats in various Places.
That, my lovelies, is a Midwinter plan to make a small velvety bear happy.
Spent the afternoon running round the Botanics. Helping out with the fashion shoot for Coco's new knitwear. He's cheaper than Kate Moss and, I would expect, cuddlier and cuter. Also less likely to complain when stuffed into a carrier bag. He's a star.
Lots of coming and going recently. Not me. I'm still in the same place. Surrounded by knitting, undone housework, piles of paper, dying house plants, and more knitting.
Bit sad when I found out that my mates Mr Flynn and Mr Beaver were moving to California. Don't know why they want to go there. We have such lovely weather in Scotland. Sometimes it doesn't rain and it's not always grey and gloomy.
Cheered up a little bit when I found out they were going to be just up the road from the amazing Spud Murphy and his wonderful singing and scarf knitting hillbillie. We could go and visit them if we weren't poor and didn't have a fear of airports. We are going to have to think of an alternative. So far we have had to reject plans involving hot air balloons and getting work as cooks on a tramp steamer. That last one was only scuppered because neither of us can cook and we're not sure what a tramp steamer is or if they exist anymore. Otherwise it was a rather good plan.
They left and Coco arrived. His Highness King Coco Pops von Sunshine of Essex is up here on a state visit. He was promised lots of adventures and excitement but so far he's had one trip to Edinburgh and done a lot of hanging about the flat with me and been forced to model knitwear.
Madame has been a right gloomy panda recently. It's not my fault that she's not allowed to hibernate. Odd the things that cheer her up.
Less impressed when she got excited over the new Byres Road Waitrose but the shiny only lasted until the first busy Sunday afternoon. She did bring us a box of Happy Monkey and Bear but apparently this Sunday I'm doing the shopping and she's having the afternoon nap.
Totally mystified by her *SQUEE! happy dance* over the news that Gourock is getting a new LYS and Ysolda Teague is going to be there next Saturday. No idea. Who's Gourock? Will the LYS eat small bears? What's an Ysolda Teague?
It's a wool thing then. Oh dearie. More wool. More knitting. I'm just going to pop over to teddy7733's blog. Excellent travel guide for small bears. Looks like I might be needing an escape plan.
I have disguised myself as a couple of balls of cheap worsted weight acrylic and, if anyone asks, we are talking about knitting mittens.
So. Yes. Twitter is A Good Thing. Mostly. It can - in the wrong paws - be a Very Very Dull Thing. Just like a ball of yarn. You can waste it on a boring old scarf or ... I'm sorry. What am I saying? Twitter. It's all Mitch Benn's fault.
We've had some fun with the old Myspace. Introduced us to some very fine stuffies like Spud and King Coco and their families. It's been good for music. But it has definately been losing ground recently. Very quiet.
Some people have been moving over to that FaceBook. Didn't fancy it. Not very bear friendly apparently. Madame - who isn't very sociable - prefers the practical sites like LibraryThing and Ravelry.
Then Mitch Benn does his Twitter song ...
Mitch Benn is one of my favourite humans. I was lucky. I caught Madame when she was too tired to resist and, by the time she realised that "Mitch Benn told me to do it" probably wasn't a good excuse, it was too late.
And there are stuffies! Old friends like Mooch and new chaps like Mr Rusty Monkey out in Carolina. I hadn't heard of the Gullah or Cherokee Tears until Mr Monkey mentioned them. Very educational for a bear of limited education.
It's wonderful to be catching up with other toys. It can be a lonely life. Back in the old days - when I was a cub - social networking was limited to a yoghurt pot telephone and a bit of chat in the toy box after lights out. Might get to see other toys in passing at play group or nursery but we were working and a lot of soft toys took early retirement. Got replaced by scary dolls. Ended up in dark, damp attics.
I've carried on working. Travelled about with Madame. She needs a lot of looking after. I couldn't leave her running wild and unchecked. My old mates Poogle and Mummy Ted have gone to live in a box on top of the bookcase. They're fine with that. Dust them every now and then and they're happy. But I wanted more.
I want things that toys my age aren't supposed to want - I want to dance to loud music, climb trees, bounce on trampolines, go fast across playgrounds in my biscuit tin car, run away from cats, build pillow forts, wear stylish outfits and fabulous frocks. All that and more.
And now I'm meeting other toys doing the same or better. Blogging. Twittering. Good stuff!
Time to get back to work. They've let that Madame have a day off tomorrow. I know her. She'll sit up all night playing with the evil yarn mountain. Then she'll be tired and grumpy. For a change.
