ooops, there I go again...

Oh dear, yes, that's another cafe.

Betty's in York this time, super-posh, queues out of the door, waitresses in aprons calling you 'madam' (madam indeed!), and £3 for a pot of tea.

Needless to say I don't go there very often!

But they are well known for their delectable cakes (and piano player, no less), and this was for *work*, don't you know, so I had to. No avoiding it at all. Absolutely none.

No cakes on this day for me though, it was SO hot, we'd walked a long way, and it was the middle of the working day (ahem), so lunch it was.

Poached eggs on toast (£5.95! Gosh) - with the toast cut into little triangles with the crusts cut off, no less. Very tasty it was too.

Just not too often...

anyway.... it's been absolutely GLORIOUS round here lately, it really has.

I've been walking around the hills and fields pretty much every evening I can, this is so close to home, and it's so quiet up there, you can see for miles, and watch the sun setting, and I always come back feeling so peaceful and like everything's right with the world.

Can't beat that feeling really.

Exciting weekend plans afoot here, mostly involving lazing around in the sunshine I hope. Hooray! Are you up to anything exciting?

working at home

It's not so bad, this working at home malarkey...

sunshine and spring

Well, I'm not entirely convinced we can say it's spring yet, but there's been some gorgeous sunshine around the place this week. I just couldn't resist taking this picture in the corner of the kitchen the other day, with the light streaming in through the living room window. Our kitchen is usually quite dark, and it just felt all lit up and colourful and spring-like.

I've also been hanging out of the attic window taking photos of the sky...

Hmm, a bit of a grey cloud sneaked in to that last one, see, we're not quite as far as spring yet!

(I'm still rather giddy at being PhD-free, so I'm sure there'll be a few more 'isn't everything great?!' posts to come in the next few days...)

Christmassy preparations

It's nearly Christmas, are you excited yet? I am, I love Christmas. Although this year, I'm feeling rather not-in-control of the preparations. Today I've had a minor breakthrough, and actually found the Christmas tree. I thought we'd thrown it away, so last year we had a 'mystic branch' instead. Today it just turned up in the cellar, must have been hiding all along. Pesky thing.

I haven't got a picture, because I also discovered that the fairy lights don't work. Eek! (should I tell you I managed to get a small electric shock trying to *make* them work while they were plugged in? Perhaps not...). So our poor tree looks rather dismal in the dark. I'm very much looking forward to putting lights on it tomorrow, I do love a tree with sparkly lights.


I've also been enjoying the festive baking in the bakery up the road. These enigmatic 'shortpaste shapes' have been given woolly hats and scarfs for the festive season, and rather jolly they look too.

The Christmas cards are nearly made, although I haven't written any of them yet. I've got some presents, but not all of them. I'm all prepared for travelling though, and on the Christmas party front, well, two down, three to go, and I'm currently in the middle of one that only three people turned up to (and they've now gone home). I'm glad of the rest!

The other thing I'm enjoying at the minute is our advent calendar. Look at the little animal pictures! We found this in a charity shop a few years ago, and it gets pulled out each year. Behind the windows are little animals, going about their Christmas preparations. It's all most cheerful.

Anyway, so here I am, with lots of leftover biscuits, and a large tasty cake, and two bottles of mulled wine, and only the two of us to finish it all off. What a job! But someone has to do it, I suppose. The candles are lit, and I'm listening to carols, and sewing linings for the living room curtains. A lovely and peaceful way to round off the weekend before a hectic week.

I hope your festive preparations are going well!

colours

A slightly gloomy week here, so I'm very much in need of a bit of colourful cheeriness. And colourful cheeriness I've had today! The sun's been shining, and there's plenty of gorgeously coloured leaves lying around. I've scoffed an entire box of strawberries today, we must be getting to the end of the season soon, these ones didn't have quite the flavour of last month's.

And oh! I haven't told you about the limes! But I might save that for a special lime flavoured post later in the week.

I've been pottering about in the garden in the sunshine this afternoon - would you believe my sweet peas are still flowering? I planted these a couple of years ago, nothing much happened last year, then this year I've had a few of these pink-and-white cheery little flowers. A few weeks ago they started producing pods, and I thought I'd seen the last of the flowers, but no! This week, they've started blooming all over again! So now there's a few of them in the kitchen along with the last of the roses (well, I keep saying 'the last of the roses', but they just won't stop flowering either! Not that I'm complaining mind you...).

And it's not just the flowers that are full of colour in the garden - look at that rainbow chard! I just couldn't capture the colour properly, such a rich, dark red, so beautiful with the light shining through it. I'm ashamed to say it's looking rather slug-munched (and would you look at all those weeds round the bottom! Oh dear!), so I've snapped a fair bit of it up to go in the freezer.

I must get out and do a rainbow-chard-themed photo session in the garden soon. I do love this stuff, all the little seeds look the same, and then you get such an array of colours! Of course, half of mine got eaten before it had much of a chance to get going, but I've still got some fine red ones, and a couple of smaller but no less cheery pink and yellow. Yes, I'll do that this week.

No pictures of the sewing project just yet, but it's progressing, if a little slowly! Perhaps I was rather too ambitious, I never was much good at following a pattern - but this one I just couldn't resist. You'll see what I mean when you see it (unless I abandon it as too much effort - which still isn't out of the question!).

the first spring weekend

Oooh, spring. The first daffs in the garden, crocuses lining the verges, and catkins hanging in the park. The days are now officially longer than the nights, and doesn't it feel good? Great, in fact.

Nothing much to report here, a weekend of pottering in the garden, and someone else's garden. Baking bread. Sewing. Playing old, old records and dancing.

And very much enjoying the squishy feeling of my new knitting project :)

Unexpected events

I snapped this picture when we went for a walk yesterday. It's taken from one of my favourite benches, not far from the house, quite high up, looking out over one of the valleys. I know I promised no more snow pictures, but I got home and realised I'd taken one from exactly the same place in the autumn, and it does show the seasonal changes rather nicely, don't you think?

(I'm afraid that after 3 weeks of snow on the ground - highly unusual for round here - I can't imagine ever being without snow again!)
This week has carried on in a mellow, relaxed way, as befits the final week of the holidays. A gradual sliding back towards work mode, with the decorations slowly coming down, a tiny bit of cleaning, and a bit of reorganisation ready for a few new routines.

There's been a couple of small unexpected events too. A phone call from Spain, from a friend I haven't spoken to for a long time. And on a cold, snowy night in the local shop, when I popped in for some milk (they didn't have any), a man ahead of me in the queue handed me a bunch of flowers. I never did figure out why, but it was exceptionally cheery, and they're easing the transition away from the winter festivities nicely.

See that bag? I found it, rummaging in a pile of fabric in a charity shop, and just had to have it, even though me and white, er, don't mix well, and it probably won't survive long. But it was 50p, it's handmade, by someone obviously trying out all the fancy stitches on a sewing machine far fancier than mine, and I couldn't resist.

I mean, look at those dogs!

My other handmade charity shop find this week was a bit more practical. Knee length, blue, thick, and warm.

(You'll have to excuse the slightly bizarre photograph, they only place in the house with enough light was standing against the living room window. And you'll have to excuse the chipped mug too - I painted it years ago, and it's been well used since then, and I'm going to keep it going as long as I can...)

2009: A review

Edited to add: I give up. I switched to the new blog editor, believing, as it said, it would make life easier. I've tried and tried to reformat this post, and every time it's ended up with either huge spaces, or no spaces, or a mixture, and photos in the middle, to the left, and generally all over the place. So I'm going to apologise for the higgledy-piggledy-ness of this post, and move on, perhaps with a new template, perhaps with the old editor, perhaps with a new blog hosting thing. We'll see. That's all.

Well, here we are at the beginning of 2010! I love the new year, the possibilities seem endless, the year stretches ahead, and I tend to do lots of plotting and scheming and planning and dreaming of all the lovely things that will happen in the coming months. 

Being stuck in the house without being on holiday, I've already done a fair bit of plotting. And I will share some of it on here this week. However, I think it's time for a little look back at 2009 first, don't you? 

Oh, I've had such fun this evening trawling through my photos of this year, laughing at the endless blurry pictures of all kinds of birds in the garden, many, many attempts to get an interesting end-of-phd photo, pictures of grass, and sky, and failed baking fiascos that never made it as far as this little blog... 

So, 2009 brought this little foray into Blogland, where I've felt very welcome and at home, ambling awestruck around other people's blogs, and trying to find my feet and put a little bit of my world out there into the big internet world. The idea was to document what happened in my little garden, and to encourage me, well, to encourage me to spend more time in the garden, and less time staring at the computer screen (no, I'm not sure I can work that one out either). 

As always, to my surprise, I planted things and they grew! 

And by the summer, our little garden was overflowing with flowers and cheeriness. We even managed to grow some food! In a rather haphazard, stick-things-in-and-see-what-happens kind of a way. I think 2010 will bring a little bit more strategic planning for the garden (just a little bit, mind you, since I do so enjoy the stick-it-in variety of gardening!)

2009 is also the year I had a go at a few new things - mostly small cheery things which seem to run along a theme of doing-rather-than-buying, like making soap:

making clothes:

making jam:

and er, eating flowers:

There's also been quite a lot of sewing, especially since April, which was when I decided to make all of the presents I gave people for the whole year. Hmm - we'll have a review this coming April on how well that's gone... 

According to my photo archive, 2009 also involved a lot of baking, and sitting around drinking tea and eating the results of the baking: 

In fact, a fair amount of sitting around in general: 

I've also found a new appreciation for being at home this year, which is good, as I've been at home an awful lot. We've been slowly (very slowly) sorting out various bits of the house, boring things like putting in a shower, and a bathroom carpet, and more cheery things like sewing glamourous stripey curtains for by the bed:

and just looking at the sunshine on the living room floor (does that count as a project?? Probably not!)

And finally (for now, since this is getting ever so long, and I really should be doing something else), I've enjoyed watching the seasons change, the sunshine:

the autumn leaves:

and the snow, yes, snow, which is quite rare round here, and so Very Exciting:

So, I think that pretty much sums up the year - learning new things, having a go, growing a bit, watching to see what happens, a fair bit of work, and quite a lot of hanging around. 

Sounds like a good plan for 2010 too, don't you think??