Christmas

Once again time went hurtling past and I haven't blogged for nearly 2 months! Oops. It has been a busy 2 months though (funny that I thought at the start of the year that once we'd rebuilt the house, moved into it and got married I'd suddenly have loads of spare time!).

But I had a long weekend in Wales, visiting my brother's family, who  moved there last year. It was incredibly beautiful - with plenty of gorgeous sky and views to admire, the kind of thing you don't get within the M25! 

We visited the Centre for Alternative Technology at Machynlleth, somewhere I'd always wanted to go, and which isn't far from where they live. It was very inspiring, with lots of interactive displays of things like solar panels and composting toilets, as well as lovely local food in the café. And, visiting in the first weekend of November, we had the whole place almost to ourselves! Definitely somewhere to return to.

 Oh dear, you can tell I'm a tourist when I find even parking notices in English and Welsh exciting!

Meanwhile, our two new apple trees were delivered from the Royal Horticultural Society gardens at Wisley and I got them planted just in time before the weather went really snowy.
 One is a half-standard Red Windsor, on an MM106 rootstock, which should fruit in September. MM106 doesn't grow too tall, as our garden isn't very big so a massive mega whopping apple tree wasn't really an option.

 The other is on another MM106 root stock, but this one is an espalier Red Falstaff, which should fruit in October. It's gone in the raised bed against the back wall.

 We had some friends over to stay for the weekend - it's so nice to finally have a house that's big enough to have people to stay. On the Saturday we went to the Royal Landscape at Savill Gardens for the day, which I'd never visited at this time of year (despite virtually living next door whilst I was at university!). Like Wisley and CAT it's well worth a visit, but the café is massively over-priced so probably better taking a picnic if you go when the weather's warmer!

 They had a squash display in one of the glasshouses, I just hope someone was going to eat them once the display was taken down!

 I attempted to grow some potatoes for Christmas lunch, but this is all that came up! About enough for two of us for two meals...

 And I'd just dug the potatoes out of the ground and got the apple trees planted and the snow started! We had some right at the end of November, which caused some problems getting to work, then a gap, then more snow in the run-up to Christmas. The second time I was very busy at home having 'flu so I didn't venture out for the first few days, and by that time South West trains were running a snow timetable so it wasn't a problem getting to work.

 We've been attempting to feed the birds but keep getting inundated with pigeons - one of which does a humming bird impression hanging off the bird feeder to get the seed! We eventually took the tray off the bottom so it didn't have that to hang onto and it seems to have stopped them for the time being.

I can recommend not having 'flu just before Christmas. I'd just got all the Christmas cards sent, then came down with it the next day and retreated off to bed for five days before staggering off to work for 2.5 days before finishing for Christmas! Fortunately we didn't have to travel anywhere this year as Mum came to us for Christmas.
It's our first "married Christmas" and our first living in the new house, so we had our first tree to put up and decorate. I was still pretty wiped out at that stage as we put it up just before Christmas, so I was hanging a couple of baubles and going to have a sit down to recover. It took ages!

And we managed to do turkey and all the trimmings. This is a plateful aimed at either Mum or the OH. I got a turkey breast from Copas Turkeys, having gone to some lengths to try and find an ethical one. Although Riverford, our veg box company, does do meat, they only did whole turkeys, not just turkey breast, and there's no way we'd have got through a whole turkey! The Copas turkey came with lots of instructions aimed at the totally novice turkey cooker (i.e. me) and seemed to work well, as well as coming from a farm only 15 miles from here!

And my Christmas dinner - all the vegetables and baked bean roast from the Lincoln Cathedral cook book!

That's all for now. I want to do a post about knitting stuff sometime soon, and I'm not back at work until 4th January, so hopefully will have some time this time!

Happy Christmas to those who celebrate it, and here's to more blogging in 2011...

More snow!

Just when the snow had mostly begun to disappear and we were all lulled into a false sense of security, the trains began to run on time again etc etc, it snowed again last night. I'd managed to get into work every day this week, but this morning one of my neighbours got his car stuck in the car park at the flats as he returned from the night shift at 4.30am. It couldn't be shifted with that much ice around, so my car was blocked in for the day. (you can't see the stuck car in this pic, but that's my poor little car shivering in the snow).

I contemplated walking to work. Which is do-able. It's about 4 miles on foot, so about an hour and a half. But it was raining, then snowing, and slushy and slippery and horrible. And I didn't really fancy it. So I put on a ridiculous number of layers, my merino long johns and walking boots and slid down to the train station and hung around waiting.

This is the view towards London. No trains in sight. One eventually showed up after half an hour, took me into Slough, where I had to change onto another train to get to Windsor, then walked to work. I was not impressed. Although my alpaca socks were very toasty and warm.

The radiator at work was swiftly covered in cast-off clothing drying out.

And what I was going to blog about this time, was much more interesting things! Like my parcel from Sara, who used to go to Knit Lincs, but then had to return home to the US last year (well, technically the year before that now).

She sent me this yarn:

Mirasol Samp'a, which is a gorgeous soft cotton.

And this book:

"Favorite Socks" from Interweave. Which is just plain cool. And two copies of Interweave Knits magazine, which she knew I already had, so they came with instructions to pass them on. I've passed them on to Nic. Thank you!!

I can't decide where to start. I haven't got any socks on the needles at the moment, but I am working on the Suri cardigan from Mirasol Collection One:

and really enjoying it. The lace pattern makes it much more interesting to knit, and I love the feel of the yarn, and the way the colours work out.

I'm off on holiday next week, so I'll be taking Suri with me (both sleeves still to go) and then try and choose a sock to start as well.

SNOW!!

If you live in a country that does snow properly (Switzerland, say, or Sweden, or maybe Canada) you're going to wonder what the fuss is about. But, yes, the UK has ground to a halt. We have the most snow we've had in 18 years, apparently. Boris thinks people are skiving off work (how are people supposed to get to work if the buses/trains aren't running?!).

I went to work. It took me an hour to drive 3 miles.


At work things were very pretty:

A small child belonging to someone or other even constructed a snowman:

But then the snow got heavier again and we decided to close up at 3 to go home before it got any worse!