You know, the ones where I have nothing really say, ramble on a bit, make lots of spelling mistakes, and talk about lots of things where I forget you guys don't know the back story behind it!
Anyway without further ado, I am feeling yucky, not really unwell, just a bit headachey, nauseous, and run down. I've spent most of today and yesterday listening to the cricket (england are playing South Africa), knitting, and sorting out some things for when I start teaching in September. I've also spent far too much time on the internet!
I leave on Sunday to go and do some climbing instruction at a Guide Camp in Northamptonshire, I get back Friday so will be a whole week away from my laptop. I'm hoping to get quite a bit of knitting done while I'm away, everything knitting right now I've been knitting for ages and I just fancy a change. It will also be nice to have nothing to do except a bit or=f work and then my time is my own but in a place where I don't have to worry about cooking or anything like that, like a paid holiday really!
I've still not managed to get out climbing personally this summer which has been a bit annoying, we (my housemates and I) had grand plans for Thursday and then it chucked it down all day. Still I'm sure that the week in Pembrokeshire with friends will make up for it!
Right I think that will do for now, before I write something odd, I'm off to get tea out of the oven and settle down looking forward to the return of The Tudors and hoping that this series features more of the delicious bum of Jonathan Rhys Meyers!
Friday, 1 August 2008
Wednesday, 30 July 2008
Swap
I just received my package in the Teachers who knit swap, it's full of wonderful things, my first ever salt water taffy (mmmm), and some gorgeous Alpaca sock yarn. I can't wait to knit it up. there is also the most gorgeous tape measure, a little sheep whose tail you pull to get out the tape and then squeeze it's belly so it retracts!
t
I also got a package from The Yarn Yards latest update. I couldn't resist some particularly lovely sock yarn in blue, some shiney merino tencel and some pencil roving which can be knit on to a fabulous tea cosey!
I just got back from a meal out with friends, which was lovely except for the feeling sick due to being a passenger coming home and not driving. I get such bad carsickness! Anyway, I think it's time for an early night, it's been a hectic week, and I'm up early to go to the bank tomorrow.
tI also got a package from The Yarn Yards latest update. I couldn't resist some particularly lovely sock yarn in blue, some shiney merino tencel and some pencil roving which can be knit on to a fabulous tea cosey!
I just got back from a meal out with friends, which was lovely except for the feeling sick due to being a passenger coming home and not driving. I get such bad carsickness! Anyway, I think it's time for an early night, it's been a hectic week, and I'm up early to go to the bank tomorrow.
Monday, 28 July 2008
Six Quirky Things
Sam over at The life and times of me tagged me for a meme. In it I basically need to tell you 6 quirky things about myself.
Here are the rules.
1)Link to the person who tagged me
2)Mention the rules
3)Tell six quirky yet boring, unspectacular details about myself
4)Tag 6 other bloggers by linking to them
5)Go to each person’s blog and leave a comment that lets them know they’ve been tagged
Here we go....
1) I love all vegetables except boiled carrots.
2) My toes are double jointed.
3) As a child I would amuse myself most happily by hammering nails in to a piece of wood.
4) I like my meat plain, no beef and mustard, lamb and mint sauce, or pork and apple sauce.
5) I love gerkins, love, love can nearly eat a jar of them.
6) I hate phoning people up, I'd much rather email if I need to arrange something.
Now 6 people to tag....
1) Slipped Stitch
2) Domestic Blissless
3) Doolittle
4) Uppercase Woman
5)Dead Baby Jokes
6) The Number Twenty Three To stop him complaining about lack of posting material!
Here are the rules.
1)Link to the person who tagged me
2)Mention the rules
3)Tell six quirky yet boring, unspectacular details about myself
4)Tag 6 other bloggers by linking to them
5)Go to each person’s blog and leave a comment that lets them know they’ve been tagged
Here we go....
1) I love all vegetables except boiled carrots.
2) My toes are double jointed.
3) As a child I would amuse myself most happily by hammering nails in to a piece of wood.
4) I like my meat plain, no beef and mustard, lamb and mint sauce, or pork and apple sauce.
5) I love gerkins, love, love can nearly eat a jar of them.
6) I hate phoning people up, I'd much rather email if I need to arrange something.
Now 6 people to tag....
1) Slipped Stitch
2) Domestic Blissless
3) Doolittle
4) Uppercase Woman
5)Dead Baby Jokes
6) The Number Twenty Three To stop him complaining about lack of posting material!
Saturday, 26 July 2008
Leisure and Pleasure
This was the theme (I hope, memory is like a sieve!) of this years Floral Art Competition at my parents local show. Mum entered 7 classes, and did very well. She's gained another couple of pieces of silver ware to polish, one for the most original use of colour, and one for the most points gained in the overall competition, she won 2 of her classes.
Last time I posted some pictures of her arrangements you were all really nice and left some lovely comments, she does read here so I'd love for her to hear that other people besides her daughter think she's wonderful!
I've uploaded all the pictures on to Flickr so they can be nice and big, if you click on the pictures it will take you to a version you can see larger.
This first one is in the category called Another Opening of Another Show and Mum chose to represent the Lord of the Rings, I have posted about this before but we have a large collection of animal skulls.
This one is World Wide Web, and unfortunately the only picture was taken with a shaky hand!
I can't quite remember the name of the class but it does represent Ballet.
This is a miniature class (it measures 25cm across) and again I've forgotten the class title!
This is the entry in the Fantasy class, which was a hanging exhibit to be viewed from all sides,
This is another class name I've forgotten and it's also a little wobbly! It represents a day at the beach.
This final one is in a class called Sporting Life where in true style Mum decided to represent Ice Climbing, we don't do those boring "safe" sports!
Finally, some Nether Garment progress, I have done the first leg, and started the second one, maybe I'll have 2 legs by the time the tour hits Paris!
On the green band I've put a 50p piece (approximately 3cm across) to give some scale.
Last time I posted some pictures of her arrangements you were all really nice and left some lovely comments, she does read here so I'd love for her to hear that other people besides her daughter think she's wonderful!
I've uploaded all the pictures on to Flickr so they can be nice and big, if you click on the pictures it will take you to a version you can see larger.
This first one is in the category called Another Opening of Another Show and Mum chose to represent the Lord of the Rings, I have posted about this before but we have a large collection of animal skulls.
This one is World Wide Web, and unfortunately the only picture was taken with a shaky hand!
I can't quite remember the name of the class but it does represent Ballet.
This is a miniature class (it measures 25cm across) and again I've forgotten the class title!
This is the entry in the Fantasy class, which was a hanging exhibit to be viewed from all sides,
This is another class name I've forgotten and it's also a little wobbly! It represents a day at the beach.
This final one is in a class called Sporting Life where in true style Mum decided to represent Ice Climbing, we don't do those boring "safe" sports!
Finally, some Nether Garment progress, I have done the first leg, and started the second one, maybe I'll have 2 legs by the time the tour hits Paris!
On the green band I've put a 50p piece (approximately 3cm across) to give some scale.
Wednesday, 23 July 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, 22 July 2008
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
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.
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.
Friday, 18 July 2008
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)