Hi everyone! Odd Sock here! It seems a long time since our last post, and we've been up to many things since then, so I don't know where to start! Having shown you a picture of Bert, our "baby" troll, I'd better tell you that he is doing well, and that he thankfully continues to stay vegetarian! As you can see, he's grown VERY quickly in the few weeks that he has been with us! He is now about the same size as his late mother, so we are hoping that he will not grow much more! He seems to have a wicked sense of humour, and likes teasing us all a lot, but he is quite gentle really. Certainly not nasty and "evil", as humans seem to expect all poor trolls to be. Moving on, I should also mention that we uploaded our "Monster Poems for Monstrous Kids" book to iBooks yesterday. We will keep you posted about when it is cleared and becomes "live" on iBooks! We decided to just launch the text version first, to see how sales go before adding an audio version too. (We have purchased a proper microphone, so hope to improve the sound quality of the audio version with it. This will give us further chances to laugh at Melinda doing the recordings!) Over the last week, Melinda has also tried out the newish Amazon "Comic Creator" software, to convert our last poem book ("Our Poems for Kids") so that it can be downloaded from Amazon. Sadly, the large file size means that Amazon refuse to sell the book for less than USD$2.99. We think that is too expensive, but have, so far, managed to get the Amazon.co.uk site to "price match" the book on iBooks to make it FREE. We hope this Kindle version will eventually become free worldwide, but unfortunately cannot control Amazon's price matching decisions. In summary, we don't really like Amazon much at the moment, and find everything to do with them very confusing! We all feel very sorry for the poor people in the South of England, who have been living with terrible flooding problems for months now. Yesterday we had yet another "mini flood" disaster here, with Melinda knocking over a large glass of water. As seen above, flood victims were dried out and taken to the Under-Radiator Evacuation Point. Melinda then sorted out less important flood water issues. We can thankfully report that everyone's stuffing appears to have dried out nicely now. We are thinking about implementing "flood-containment" measures, possibly involving a washing-up bowl. And, finally, we have AT LAST added some printable colouring-in pictures to our website. Please check out the "Fun Things to do!" section. Think that's everything for now! Sending out hugs and smiles to you all! From the Top of the Wardrobe Gang! xxxxxx
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Yes, we've finally finished all our drawings, and our poems have been edited, critiqued, re-edited, and read through a zillion times... So we think it is about time we declared our next book FINISHED and READY TO LAUNCH! We've decided to upload two versions of the book to the Apple iBookstore, one will include audio files. So you just click on a speaker icon for each poem verse, and you get to hear Melinda reading it out for you! We hope that Melinda will be able to borrow a Mac PC to upload both books on Saturday. Then we will have to wait for Apple to "process" them. We'll keep you posted on progress! PD here now! Yes, we've had lots of fun and we've been laughing a lot today! First we had to get Melinda to read the poem verses out while we recorded them, but we all kept pulling funny faces at her, so she kept laughing or getting the words wrong! Then, just when we'd finished rolling on the floor laughing at the audio recordings, Bert decided to make his first escape from his washing basket! We knew that moment was getting very near, as Bert is pretty big now (twice the size of poor Odd Sock, who is supposed to be looking after him!) In fact Bert has been desperately trying to escape from his basket for the last couple of days! Once out, Bert started tearing round the room like a crazy troll! Eventually we managed to calm him down and to get him to sit down. (I think he'd just worn himself out by that point.) TT and I couldn't help laughing at the sight of poor Odd chasing him around, trying to corner him! We think that Odd is now a lot more worn out than Bert. She hasn't even been on Twitter yet tonight, to say hello to her friends there! We'd better go now, it's our bedtime here in the UK. Night night everyone!
Hi there! Our gadget finally arrived from Apple, so I can now show you a few more of our Norway trip photos! First, though, I thought you might like to see just how much Bert has grown in the last few days! He can't quite escape from his washing basket yet, but we think it will happen any day soon, and we are preparing ourselves for chaos! Our friend Mary suggested that we tried feeding him on carrots instead of toy cars. His poor sore new teeth seem to find these chewy enough, and his tummy seems a lot happier now too! We are keeping Bert at Melinda's for now, as we had to keep pushing Bert's washing basket around the house to hide him from Billy's Mum, but we eventually got found out. (Billy's Mum was desperate to do some washing, and looked everywhere far faster than we could move him...) So, back to Norway! We were staying at this bunkhouse in a place called Rjukan, and below is the massive pile of wood that the humans had kindly collected up for our nice wood burning stove. (This meant that Buster, PD and I could stay nice and cosy each day, while the humans went out to play in the snow and ice!) Here is our room! (If you look carefully then you will spot Buster sitting on our bottom bunk at the far end of the room.) And this was our comfy living room, with our nice warm stove being positioned just off the left of the picture. It wasn't until our last night there that I noticed this picture on the wall. Hmmm....doesn't that look like a group of frozen or hiding TROLLS?! So, here's a photo below to show everyone just how beautiful Norway is in the snow... We popped in to see our new animal friend Tenzin on our way back to the airport... ...and PD Monkey kept teasing me that I would be flying home with Bert via Fisherprice not Ryan Air, as Bert had no ticket!! So, our Norway adventure sadly came to an end, but we have Bert with us now as a very lasting reminder of our holiday! (And I intend to scrutinise the other photos my unobservant humans took, as who knows what Troll activities they missed if they didn't actually fall over them...) Bye for now,Love Odd Sock xxx
Hi everyone, Odd Sock here! I can't show you the rest of our Norway holiday photos yet, as we are still waiting for our new adaptor to arrive for the iPad. (It's been dispatched by Apple, so "paws crossed" it will be here in tomorrow's post!) I did manage to take a photo of our baby Troll, Bert, today though - by using the iPad camera. This is Bert's first photo (he doesn't seem to like cameras), so I wanted to share it with you all. Our bear friend, Toddy, thinks that Trolls normally eat goats, but I'm hoping to raise Bert as a vegetarian, as I don't want to kill any poor goats for him. Another of our good bear friends, Jeremy, cleverly suggested that poor Bert might be chewing my paws so much because he was teething. Jeremy's suggestion of toy cars has been working, but Bert seems to chew the whole cars up, and then he swallows all the bits up! Oscar and Buster are seen here offering Bert his THIRD toy car, to distract him from me trying to take the picture! Billy is getting less keen on us feeding his toy cars to Bert, so we may have to think of something else soon! Bert seems to be growing quickly, so we think it will not be long before he escapes from the washing basket! Melinda has been trying to contact Troll sanctuaries in Norway, as she says we cannot keep Bert once he gets bigger. (His poor Mum was about 3 feet tall, so a dwarf by Troll standards, but still MUCH bigger than all of our gang!)
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AuthorsThe Top of the Wardrobe Gang: Oscar Rabbit, PD Monkey, Odd Sock, Burton Bear, Terry Tiger (TT), Burton Bear; helped by Melinda Kinsman Archives
October 2018
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