Birthday

I am feeling spectacularly old and wrinkly (and don't mention the sagging bottom) today as I've just turned 30. The horrors of wrinkledom/sagginess etc were somewhat assuaged by a great day with the OH and some rather groovy presents! Although he did refuse my request to get cracking with the birthday cake at midnight last night (he seemed to think sleep was a better idea?!) I did get a chocolate cake with a candle for each decade!

And the best present! A digital camera! I'd been using the camera on my mobile until now. He took me out for lunch after church this morning and we went for a walk afterwards so I had a chance to experiment with some camera settings. Close up plant things:

It's got different aspect ratio settings - so I can take pictures of things and use them as my desktop background picture. So I had an experiment with some yarn pictures.

And played around with taking pictures of the water as we walked along the Thames.











And other presents? Well, a Mamma Mia DVD and Diarmaid MacCulloch's "A history of Christianity" were among them, both of which I'd been coveting! The OH must be able to read my mind. Actually, he wants to read the book too so we might need to take it in turns. It's got about 1300 pages so this might take a while.

Knitting pictures will resume shortly, once I've finished playing with the camera settings.

Recipes!

I have been knitting (a little bit) but where does the time go?! And what on earth have I been doing with it?

I've just found a recipe website that's a little like Ravelry. It's fun and seems useful - great potential for looking up veg box type recipes, or things to cook with meat when you don't know what you're doing (= me). There are separate US (or North American?) and UK/Irish versions, I assume because of the different ways of measuring ingredients. Anyway - it's called All recipes... And it will probably end up being as time-consuming as Ravelry.

In which many houses are sold, a book is given up on and someone gets stuck in a wedding dress

The OH and I (and the rest of my family) have just finished a completely mad round of house moves/sales/purchases. My Mum sold her house last week, which was the home I lived in until I was 18 before I left to go to university, and where I temporarily lived again for a while in my mid-20s. This is the last bowl of pears I'll have from the pear tree that was planted in the garden when I was born.


I wasn't there when she moved out, so the last time I saw it was in August, when we were up in Lincoln and got engaged. So it feels slightly odd knowing that it isn't there any more to go back to.

And to add to the chaos/stress/impending feeling of a little bit too much going on, the OH completed on the sale of his flat on the same day as Mum sold her house, and I completed the sale of my house five days after them. So a bit of a manic whirl of solicitors, estate agents and utility companies, not helped by the Royal Mail going on strike and holding half the correspondence up. But all is now finished! We'll be looking round for a house to buy now that we've sold both places and, of course, this means that wedding plans can inch slightly further forward too.

Before anyone gets too excited, wedding plans so far have consisted of me reading various insane books about wedding planning and getting very annoyed with them. Oh, and trying on a dress last week in Monsoon and getting stuck in it.

And speaking of books... I've just been attempting to read "A short walk in the Hindu Kush" by Eric Newby, and I can't get into it at all. I dragged myself through about 100 pages, as it's my next reading group book so I wanted to show willing, but just had to give up when I realised I was actively avoiding picking the thing up. I'm not sure what annoyed me so much. The jolly hockeysticks feeling of the writing? The slightly fuzzy typeface? The blurry maps at the beginning (it's a travel book, surely the idea is you can see where they're going?). Anyway, not the book for me, so it'll be interesting to see what the rest of the group made of it when I see them next week.