A Relaxing Afternoon Out

 

I seemed to have been spending a lot of time indoors at the end of last week, plus we had son no 2 with us and we hadn't done much together,  so on Sunday I insisted we go out for a while. We ended up going to the Nature /RSPB reserve at Loch Leven which on paper looked like just what I needed. In the event that RSPB place is not at the end of the loch I would have liked to be at, i.e. the end with the island castle so that was a bit sad, but not, you know, huge. 

There is a heritage trail which goes all the way round and I hope to go back on several occasions in future,  join it at different points and walk a different bit of it each time. That said we did the wetlands walk which was about the right length for us, although sadly you don't see an awful lot of the loch as you do that, then we treated ourselves to some hot chocolate and cake in the cafe. As I said, a walk that loses us about 18 calories, then we stuff our faces with 256 more. There's a small shop as well, so I picked up my first pack of Christmas cards for this year. 

My packing is just about done although I was fazed by learning that Emirates, with whom we are flying, do not allow women to take  a piece of cabin baggage and a handbag. Every other airline I have ever used allows that, even Easyjet! On the upside at least I checked, rather than pitching up at the airport tomorrow  with an extra bag that wasn't allowed. Other than that it went relatively smoothly which is a good thing as I'm a teeny bit nervous still and didn't need to get stressed over the packing. 

So, a bientot! 

Wool stats and finished projects for September

 yes, I'm getting the standard posts (wool, books) out of the way early this month because the holiday is not far away now and when I come back I don't want to have to face doing those when I could be blogging about the trip. 

Just for info, we go on Wednesday and will be back just in time for the clock change; son no 2 is holding the fort here and cat sitting while we're gone. We are going to Japan; flying to Tokyo for a few days and then doing a cruise which circumnavigates Japan and also includes a stop in South Korea. I've gone through a few reactions since we booked it, settled for months on 'apprehensive' and I'm now slowly tipping over into 'excited'. Hopefully the dial will get to 'very excited ' at some point. I haven't told many people where we're going, but I'm very pleased that I told Heather way back in spring when we first booked it, otherwise she would never have known and she was so excited for us. It's a big holiday but it's a joint celebration of our Big Birthdays and everyone we know who has been there says it's wonderful, so fingers crossed. 

Meanwhile, the wool stats. In was 150g, of which 100g was this month's self striping sock club, currently half knit up (yay!) The other 50g was something I bought to make a present with for Christmas. Since it was Rowan Kidsilk Haze the present isn't growing particularly quickly but it will be ready in time. Out was 600g,  400g of this, which I bought in August,  went into the new top for my holiday, 54g got used up in a hat which is also a  Christmas present, 30g into my long term project and 116g was given away. Net decrease for the month was 450g, and for the year to date is 1942g. All in the right direction. I'd like to have a huge decrease in the next couple of months before the yearn advents arrive in December, but I'm not hopeful.  Especially since I won;t be getting much done on the holiday. Of course I'm taking knitting but probably only socks so we'll see how it goes. 

Meanwhile here's the top - not a great photo but it's very pretty, and it fits! The colour is much nicer than it shows here - a cornflower blue. 

And the hat. Yet again it's the fisherman's cap. I knitted this from stash yarn, with a 4ply and a suri alpaca held together which makes it lovely and warm. It doesn't seem much for a month but I did some cross stitch as well which was fun but it's soooo much slower than knitting. 

There may be one more post before we go but definitely not two, as Tuesday is dedicated to packing!

September Books

 

I read six books in September and started another and for the first time in ages there were more non crime than crime, and I found that very pleasing. 

The DNF, which was more a HES ( hardly even started ) was The Sewing Machine by Natalie Fergie. I got this from Borrowbox late at night and was somehow fooled into thinking it wasn't yet another bloated family saga told over decades of the C20, in which men are men and go off to war and women are downtrodden but find themselves by achieving financial independence in some fairly non-male threatening way. In the event this is exactly what this was. I think I gave it 50 pages before I sent it back. 

So with that out of the way ... the first one I finished was Juliet Barker's The Brontes: A Life in Letters ,which is obviously a re-read. I was rather concerned to find that I was not as annoyed by Charlotte and Emily as I remember being in the past; however I read it partly as preparation for rereading Barker's  monumental joint biography of all four Bronte children and I'm fairly sure that once I embark on that I will find Charlotte, at least, as irritating as ever.   Unless I have mellowed a great deal since I last read it. 

The book club chose a J D Kirk, not at my suggestion I hasten to add. It was his latest, called 'Better the Devil. It went down well which isn't surprising,. Quite a few members were already fans and it was the mixture as before; a bit of a plot, good interaction between team members  and lots of humour, sometimes very dark. 

After that was Robert Harris' Agrippa which had been very well reviewed and which I used an Audible credit for. This was a mistake. Obviously Harris has decided that Agrippa was a fairly stolid, 'follow orders and support the man in charge' military type which presumably works well  on the page. The story is told in the first person and sadly the narrator had decided that he needed to make Agrippa someone with no expression in his voice at all, presumably because he was a fairly stolid military type etc This made for dullness. In fact it made it a very good book to fall asleep to which hadn't at all been the plan. In fairness it straightened out for me a lot of history that I had been confused about before; also taught methat Augustus really wasn't a loud cuddly Brian Blessed type, he was a murdering, power hungry horror (I Claudius reference there for any reader old enough to catch it). I came to the conclusion that overall the book  would have been better as  a read than a listen. 

Next up was Savage her Reply by Deirdre Sullivan which retells the Irish myth of the Children of Lir, who were turned into swans by their stepmother. Sullivan tells the story from the point of view of the stepmother and makes her credible and sympathetic.  I was fascinated by this book and read it over only a few days, helped by the fact that Sullivan writes beautifully. Her prose is poetic without being pretentious and it flows like a river. Highly recommended if   myths and/or lyrical writing are your thing. 

Finally got around to Frankly, the memoir by Nicola Sturgeon of her life in Scottish politics. I won't say it was totally disillusioning, but politics, even when pursued in a good cause, seems to be a dirty business by default. 

And finally another crime novel, The Midnight Feast by Lucy Foley. I got this from Borrowbox because her latest book, which is a new Miss Marple novel commissioned by the Agatha Christie estate isn't available for months from the library and I thought this might give me a taste of her writing. It's less a crime novel than a ' who are all these people, how are they connected and what is going to happen next' novel. It was soooooooooooooooo slow. I got so impatient with it. Multiple POVs, and two time periods, and at the end the number of connections between this seemingly random group of people stretched credibility to its borders and beyond. I'm not saying that I don't like loose ends to be tied up in a book because I do. What I'm saying is that not all loose ends need to end up in the same oversized knot. Very disappointing. 

How long have you known me?

 I could make a guess if you told me how surprised you were to hear that last Friday I went with my friend S to the Barbie Exhibition at Kelvingrove in Glasgow. 

If your reaction is ' that sounds like a fun thing to do and I bet you enjoyed it' I've known you for less than ten years and probably more like three. 

If it is 'You? And Barbie? I can't quite believe that' then you've known me a long time and it's probably time we had a catch up. I am not the same as teenage/twenties me. 😄

I was not brought up to appreciate fun, or to feel that it's OK to do fun things just because they are fun,  and also that some things you should never admit to finding fun at all. Barbie would very much fall into the latter category. However I have learned over the past few years, occasionally with great difficulty,  that actually there is nothing wrong with fun; in fact it can add greatly to the enjoyment of life and of course I have also had to learn that it is also not wicked to enjoy life.  So when S and I were wondering what to do on our latest jaunt we thought Barbie, that might be fun, and we went. And it was. 

It was also a bit overwhelming. I had no idea that there had been well over 200 iterations of Barbie, nor that she had followed so many careers ( quite often totally unsuitably dressed) nor that she had owned such an extensive property portfolio. We alternated between 'I remember that' and 'After my time' and 'I don't think they sold that one in the UK.'

I never had a Barbie and I don't think I ever hankered after one, certainly not in the same way that I hankered after Sindy her UK equivalent. But she was there, in the background, in all the toy shops and endlessly advertised on television so a peripheral part of my growing up. I was  astonished by this piece of information recorded in the exhibition

here are a few Barbies - there were cabinets and cabinets of them 

and here are some Kens - I think this is every version of Ken they every made 

Seems like enough!