My birthday (a while ago now)

So, back in October, I had a birthday, but, as I said in my last post, life was a bit busy for a while so I never got round to blogging about it. Ever wondered what Slough station looks like at  8am on a Sunday? Almost totally deserted. This was when I had to head over to Bristol for a work conference and, of course, there was engineering work on our railway line that weekend with rail replacement buses on instead, so it seemed easier to drive to Slough and go from there...

Anyway, that is now all finished, and I'm getting caught up with all the time off in lieu that I managed to accumulate in the early part of November. So, my birthday? Well, you've already seen the plant purchases, from our lunch and afternoon out to the garden centre.

Then I got some fabulously cool presents. The crafty ones are here. The OH got me some blocking mats, which are already proving useful for pinning things out for blocking. I like being able to use just a few of them to block a small item, or the whole thing for something big. A friend gave me a make a bag kit, which I'm looking forward to trying as I want to do more sewing.

These are the other ones (I also got a new dress, but I haven't got a picture of that!). The Borgen box set - we really enjoyed the first series but recorded it then waited ages to start watching it. It turned out that the final episode was only partially recorded so We Couldn't Find Out What Happened - really annoying! Anyway, this meant we could finish watching the first series, and then get going with the next two series. And the book about the Magna Carta and Lincoln, cos, you know, Magna Carta is going to be big next year. Oh, and a Montezuma chocolate library!

It was a lovely birthday, even though it feels like a long time ago now... We'd thought about trying to have a holiday the week of my birthday, but we couldn't quite coordinate getting the same week off work, so our few days in Salisbury ended up being a couple of weeks before it.

Bank holidays # one

The last few weeks have been a bit stressful as I have acquired a new job! I won't be leaving my current job and starting the new one until July, but I put my application in in March and went to a rather stressful interview (including having to give a presentation!), got offered the job the next day, then had to wait ages for paperwork to come through to confirm it. Anyway, I am really excited about it, although July feels like a very long way off still. The good news too is that it's a longer commute as I'll be heading into London every morning, which means more time on the train to knit or read.

Thankfully our bank holidays have been piling up in this country, and some time to relax was just what I needed after all that. Last weekend we had Good Friday and Easter Monday off work, and this weekend we have Friday off for the royal wedding, and Monday off because it's May Day. I could get used to 3 or 4 day weeks at work...

We put the Easter weekend holidays to good use. On the Monday we paid a visit to a National Trust property,  Clandon Park, near Guildford. This is the side of the house, I tried taking a picture of the front, but there were too many cars parked there, which looked a bit incongruous!

Inside was perfect for a visit on a hot day. Cool, light and airy. The rooms are huge, the biggest being the Marble Hall (with the side of the OH in for scale):

 This was the only room where photography is allowed. The other rooms aren't so high, but are equally imposing. And afterwards walking through the grounds, we found a field of daffodils that must have looked amazing about 6 weeks ago.

After Clandon we travelled on to do some exploring in Guildford. Of course, being a bank holiday the tourist information centre and the museum were shut, but we did climb up to have a look at the keep (all that remains of Guildford castle, and now surrounded by park).

and found the river Wey, slightly prosaically hidden behind Debenhams.

On the Saturday we paid a very hot and sticky visit to the garden centre to get stocked up with compost and plants. I would recommend not visiting a garden centre on Easter Saturday as about a million other people had had the same idea and we had to queue for ages to pay.

So we finally escaped, with the boot full of compost.

And the gap between the front and back seats stuffed with plants.

I'll be posting more about the garden soon when I do a gardening post for the 1st of the month.

I have been beavering away doing some knitting, but haven't any photos yet to show. Oh and the OH got me an Easter egg:

The next few months promise to be fairly hectic. I've got a couple of big projects to finish off at work before I leave, plus some reading and preparation to do ready for starting the new job. But, of course, there's still another 3 bank holiday days still to go...

Salmon fishing

I have bits of half-written blog posts around. I haven't blogged for aagggggeeeessss, life got a bit in the way. Weird how when I had loads of time there wasn't that much to blog about, now that there's LOADS of things to blog about there isn't any time to blog...


Anyway, I was going to review some books, but instead I'll just mention them a bit:
August's reading group book was Paul Torday's Salmon fishing in the Yemen
which I highly recommend. It really is as crazy as the title suggests - who in their right mind would think of going salmon fishing in the Yemen is the whole premise of the book. The story is told from a number of points of view, using a variety of diary entries, email conversations, narrative, letters etc, which I found straightforward to follow but I suspect some readers might not like the jumping around? It's about daring to believe that the impossible can really happen, with some swipes at politics and mad corporate worlds thrown in too. That also makes it sound deadly serious, which it isn't. It's highly amusing in parts, and also very sad in parts. But I think you have to read it for yourself!

I've also read:
Maggie Sefton A killer stitch another of her knitting mysteries. Not serious reading but a lot of fun.
Patrick Gale The whole day through Again, highly recommended. I love Patrick Gale!

Knitting-wise, I've finished one nephew jumper and nearly finished the other one. Still part way through the Owen socks, then I started Iron Knitter, at which I proved to be a total failure due to lack of time and didn't even complete the first round! Plus my knitting got exterminated by a dalek, which didn't help...

I haven't blogged for so long Blogger has changed the way you upload photos!
This is the yarn I bought at Norfolk yarn on holiday - 900g of Araucania Toconao at half price. It's gorgeous, 100% wool aran weight, all squooshy and soft and I'm thinking about making Amused by Jordana Paige with it.

Then I discovered that FOUR people I know are expecting babies in February or March. Is there something in the water? Haven't started any baby knitting yet but I'm going to have to soon.

A lot of time suddenly disappeared when I discovered that Bloglines, which I've been using to follow blog updates for the last five years was closing on 1st November and I had to shift all my blog subs over to Google Reader. It did give me a chance to go through them (and realise how many people have stopped blogging!) but it seemed to take forever....

We have been doing a lot in the garden. The huge and diseased buddleias have disappeared...

 To be replaced with a nice bit of empty space. I am gradually working my way along the raised bed with the "no dig" method I read about - you put some cardboard on top of the soil, pile compost from the compost heap on top of it and spend the winter drinking tea and eating chocolate in the warm whilst the worms do all the hard work of breaking down the cardboard and mixing the whole lot together.

And a friend of ours gave us two apple trees as a (deliberately) belated wedding present as it is only now the right time to plant new trees. They haven't been delivered yet, but this a picture I took when we went to choose them at the plant centre at the Royal Horticultural Society gardens at Wisley. One is an espalier to go against the back wall, the other a standard shape to go in the lawn.



I think that's all for now. Hopefully it won't be so long before my next blog post, still haven't blogged about more of the books I've read and some of the knitting! I got horribly behind with reading people's blogs whilst transferring all my blog subs over but have been trying to catch up with commenting.

Chocolate, a book, some knitting

I finished reading "The road home" by Rose Tremain for reading group. Links to a review in the Guardian, LibraryThing and the Orange Prize website (it won this last year). I was a bit disappointed with it, I think because I'd been expecting great things from Tremain and I don't think it was up to that level. The story follows Lev, from an unidentified Eastern European country, who comes to London to find work and send money back home to his mother and daughter after his wife dies. At first he is totally disorientated in the city, has to sleep rough and his first "job" involves delivering leaflets for £5 a day. But he finds his feet, improves (dramatically!) his circumstances and eventually returns home. Some parts seemed very authentic - the descriptions of London during a hot summer's day, the treatment of immigrants, the confusion that is London if you don't know it, are a few examples, but Lev seemed unrealistically lucky. He definitely fell on his feet, in what seemed an unlikely way. I'm not sure that it is a story of a typical immigrant's stay in the UK, although I'm not sure if there's such a thing as a "typical immigrant" anyway! It was very readable though it's not the sort of book I'd end up staying up all night just to finish, but reading it wasn't a chore.

Last weekend I went to stay with a friend near Solihull, which included a trip to Cadbury World! Alarmingly, the website says "where chocolate comes to life", which I'm not sure is a good thing. Is chocolate meant to be alive, rather than in my tummy? Anyway, as you can see from the pic at the top, you can write your name in chocolate, and go to something called "Essence" where they show you how Dairy Milk is made, and you then get to choose some sweets and have melted Dairy Milk squirted on top:


Mine were liquorice allsorts.

Cadbury World was fun (if stuffed full of small children who were all on sugar highs and looked like they were about to be sick). I think I was attempting to be too academic about it all - I'd have liked to have much more to read about the history side of it in the Bourneville Experience section, rather than just a game about designing your own town. Wikipedia has more about it.

On the Sunday we went for a walk at Baddesley Clinton, a medieval moated manor house with beautiful gardens, dating from the 15th century:

Knitting news:

The bits of Suri are now all knitted. I just need to block (where?) and sew the seams up. So it'll be a while yet before completion.

I gave up on the Herringbone socks after the third frogging, and have switched to No Purl Monkeys instead. I'm loving the way the colours work out in the pattern.

I've also been playing around with the sidebar of my blog and re-organised some of the gadgets. I hope you like my interactive sheep too - if you pat it it baas!

Lent

After much cogitation I decided to "do" Love Life Live Lent this year. I considered giving up chocolate, but decided (charitably) that this would be unfair on my work colleagues, who would have to work alongside me in a chocolate-deprived state for several weeks. Last year's carbon fast attempt was fairly disastrous - I ended up having so many accommodation problems in Windsor that I went away every weekend and drove between 200 and 500 miles every weekend for the whole of Lent! Oops.

So Love Life Live Lent seems much more do-able. I've also signed up for the daily updates on Twitter, which are a good reminder...

So far, I've successfully accomplished:

• Give up your place in a queue to someone else. (I let cars in ahead of me at various Slough junctions. This is causing pandemonium - Slough drivers aren't used to people being nice).
• Say something nice about someone behind their back. (This was quite easy as everyone is so flipping nice at work that we don't go in for being bitchy).
• Say a prayer for someone who is unwell or is in need. (In theory easy, but I did try to spend a bit more time actually doing it).
• Give a homemade gift to a loved one. Easy peasy for a knitter. I posted off a dishcloth for the Happiness Swop on a Ravelry forum for Christians with depression.

but have had a few problems with:

• Skip a meal and give the money to a charity working overseas. a. I'm skinny. I don't DO skipping meals b. My daily food budget is £4, which is going to make a massive difference to some charity, hmm. I decided to eat the meal as normal but donate a bit more than normal to charity this week .
• Take things to a charity shop, recycle or Freecycle. I have piles of stuff waiting to be sorted (a large wodge of clothing, and there are currently 3 computers sitting in my living room waiting for files to be transferred before I recycle/Freecycle 2 of them), I just haven't had time to sort them yet...
• Have a TV-free evening and do something with your household instead. TV-free evening = easy. Spend evening with my household? Less easy. My household is me. So I thought I'd write this blog post instead and then read my book ("The Road Home" by Rose Tremain).