A day out...

We (my Mum, dad and I) went for a good old fashioned day out today, and for once the British weather decided to be obliging, certainly not wall to wall sunshine and blue skies, but sunny enough to make me regret forgetting the sun cream, my back and shoulders feel a little warm!
We went to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and it was fabulous, some of the sculpture was not my thing, but some of it was amazing. I was particularly taken with some by an artist called Sophie Ryder. she uses a figure of a hare alot in all her sculptures. But she also does wire "drawings" which are amazing, I only have photos of one of these as the others were indoors so I couldn't take photos. I really recomend you take a look at her website.

For me one of the best things about her work was the sense of fun, when she made the original sculpture to be cast in bronze she embedded scrap objects in it, and they just made me smile!


How many household objects can you spot in this hand?




Recognise him?



The trees were also very beautiful, this was the biggest Beech tree any of us have ever seen.

This was the wire drawing I was talking about, so unbelievably clever.


The park also has sculptures by many other artists including Henry Moore.

We wished we'd managed to see the Andy Goldsworthy exhibition as I love his work. There are still a few permanent pieces there, but none of the more natural pieces that I love so much.
The cafe is fabulous, and it's free to get in you just pay car parking of £4. We spent all day there and still didn't managed to see everything. If you want a day out then I really recommend it.

Books

It's not something I write alot about on here but I love to read, I'm the person who has shelves of books, and has read every book on those shelves several time. One of my saddle bags on the horse riding holiday was pretty much full of books!

IComLeavWe has started again, this is the new version of NaComLeavMo, and far more manageable, as you only leave comments for 1 week out of every month, already I've added a new blog to my feed reader. Again like last time I've found myself becoming more energised about my own blogging, I've been stuck in a rut recently with nothing to write about. One of the posts I've commented on today had a post up about the Top 100 books according to The BIg Read, apparently the average adult has only read 6 books off the list.
Without further ado here is what I've read, please feel free to copy this list let me know what you've read and make recommendations about any other good books. Ones in bold are ones I've read, sometimes I've added comments about a book.


1.Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible 
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (Everybody should read this, particularly the last book of the trilogy)
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (seriously, this is a great read??? I read to relax and escape, not to make my brain work hard working out what the hell the meaning of the words actually are)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (I've listened to the radio plays, which I think is as good as)
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck 
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (this is not a great read, there are so many better books than this)
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding (I had to study this for English GCSE, I now hate this book with a passion)
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan 
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth (Tried to read this and hated it so gave up)
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens 
58. A Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (A short History of Nearly Everything is much better)
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (Again he has better books than this, I loved Fantastic Mr Fox and Danny Champion of the World far more)
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I think I manage to up the average from 6 quite nicely. I have noticed that I was far more well read as a child though. As I've got older I find I'm drawn to books that are easy to read and don't make my head hurt after a day at work but I'm fine with that. 

Just to add because I was asked about them a Nether Garment photo, they're coming along well, I hope to get the first leg done by tomorrow, I'm off to knit night again tonight where I can get alot done.

Sorry

It feels a bit like I've lost my blogging mojo at the moment. All I seem to be able to post about is knitting, I really don't want to turn this in to a knitting blog, I want this to be a full representation of my life, warts and all.

It's been hard to write about very much recently, after I came back from holiday I have worked like a maniac, I have had tone day off since I came back last Thursday. This week I've driven 300 miles getting to work (and diesel is £1.30 a litre, there goes 1 day's pay). There is only so many times I can talk about teaching climbing, while every day is different as the kids are always different in essence every day is the same, I do the same things in pretty much the same places. I do however love it. It's also been tricky because as Eliza over at Doolittle (link in the side bar) there is a great unblogablability going on with my family. No one is dead or dying, but it has meant that one big nasty event has been at the forefront of my mind since Wednesday to the exclusion of nearly everything else.

One thing that apparently my brain can focus on is my knitting however, so I am very sorry to yet again present more photos of my Nether Garments. We are now at knee height on leg 1.


I love how the varying widths is doing wonderful things to the variagated asphalt tour yarn. This is on the lower calf-



This on the upper calf-


These are perfect knitting fr a busy mind, it's just simple knit, knit, knit and just as I start to get sick of one colour the mini ball runs out and it's time to start a new colour.

GoogleHer

At the moment it seems I can't visit a blog without it talking about Blogher, while I'm a bit mystified about what it exactly is, who can go there and why you'd want to it has inspired a really good meme. Carmen over at Mom to the Screaming Masses has posted about a meme where you type your name in to Google and list 5 facts about people with your name that you find as a result.

1) The top link is to an Australian singer who I really hope never makes it to the UK as it's all a bit rubbish and teenage angsty!
2)The next is to my actual user profile on UKClimbing
3) The next is a Facebook link to someone who isn't me
4) Another one is to a diary I wrote for our local radio station during my 2 months trip in Thailand (which I still need to tell you guys about, I haven't forgotten!)
5) It also appears that someone with my name works for a corporate finance firm.

What about you, what do you get when you type your name in to Google? Leave me a comment or write a post and let me know.

Progress

Ok some time soon I promise to post about something about knitting, but I'm very proud of my progress so far.

I'm 8.5 inches in, and have started the calf shaping. It's going really well, I've even done a stripe of both of the special tour colours.
Here's a quick picture-


It's taken on my web cam so not the greatest quality but you get the idea! most of this progress was amde at my first ever knit night which I've just got back from.

All day today and tomorrow I've been or will be teaching climbing outside, I've been getting up at 7.00 each morning to get over to where we're climbing. Hopefully tonight I won't have the trouble I've been having of just not wanting to sleep! I'm looking forward to my day off on Thursday as I need to get my room organised, while everything is out of boxes some stuff is still in piles, which is making me very messy. If it's not tidy to start off with making myself tidy up what I've just arrived back with is very difficult!

More tour stuff, and a long day

All weekend I've been working. Today has been at a mobile climbing tower at a Outdoor sports festival in Sheffield called Cliffhanger. I've spent all day putting on and taking off climbing harnesses and my fingers hurt!
However despite the aching fingers I have managed to cast on for my Nether Garments tonight (finally!). I've not done as much as I wanted as I've also had to do some computer stuff, but now they're started I've stepped in the right direction!

Here's a quick photo, the colour is very wrong as it was taken in the dark and I can't get the camera flash to come on???




Here's also all the yarn I've been sent to do in between the special colourways I talked about yesterday. A big thank you to Natalie, Sussex Yorkie, Northernlights, and Jammam.

Tour de France Knitalong

Ok, now I'm back from holiday i need to get on with this! The tour started last Thursday just as I went on holiday! So far I have worked out what I need to knit and have the yarn to knit it with. The project won't get done in the remaining time which is why I signed up for the Yellow Jersey, as it means I don't have to complete it!

The yarn I'm mostly using is a special colourway made for the tour by Natalie at the ever wonderful The Yarn Yard There are 2 different colours, one is subtly variegated and inspired by tarmac, the other is plain and is bright green, called Germolene because after all a good Tour would not be complete without a few crashes. I'm also using scraps of yarn kindly donated by other people, hopefully I have enough, I'm aiming for colourful and a bit random, if you want to send me any then feel free, email me at hilltopkatie at gmail dot com, it does need to be superwash and preferably have some nylon content though please.





I've not wound them yet, that's the job for tomorrow evening, after all I need to use my brand new home-made birthday present Swift!


(Yes I know it needs a bit more assembly, I was in a rush yesterday night!)


Anyway, we've been set an intermediate sprint by the organisers, this feels slightly like cheating as technically I haven't cast on, but I promise it will happen tomorrow! We've been asked to share more about your project, why have you chosen it, and how does it link to the tour.
In case you've forgotten I'm knitting Nether Garments by Elizabeth Zimmerman from her Knitters Almanac (that's a Ravelry link I'm afraid, sorry for any non-Ravellers).
To me they're a prefect cycling link, after all think of cyclists you think of tight fitting lycra. I used to have an ex-boyfriend who was in to road biking so know how this obsession with skin tight clothing goes! Wool shorts would be a little impractical, but a pair of wool leggings that I can use as thermal underwear in the horrible British winters would be highly useful. Some cyclists who aren't real men also ride in full length leggings to!

Let's hope however that I look more like these men


and less like these...



Except you know, without the inconvenient anatomy!