A mostly picture post

Or 'Reasons To Be Cheerful in photographic form'!

Picture 1 - Why a Mostly Picture Post? Because going on a school trip* with a bunch of lively eight-year-olds takes it out of a girl! Can't stop yawning now! Hats off to their teacher, I don't know she does it day in, day out. It was a lovely day though - interesting and entertaining. Look what I found:

My favourite things - spindle whorls, needles and the like. I love seeing ancient things like these when you know what they were for and how they were used and it puts the rather distant concept of 'the ancient Egyptians' into some kind of context - it's not all pyramids and shabtis and hieroglyphics, it's also people making cloth. That's something I can relate to.

Picture 2 - here's Miss Mouse after the school Valentine's disco. She also came home with a chocolate heart (for being best dancer in Primary One) and three red fake roses. So a good night out! I sat in the room set aside for parents and got to know some of the other mums better which is always good.


Picture 3 - my current knitting (when I don't feel like doing my razorshell scarf). They're another pair of socks for the boy, 'negatives' of the last pair which he likes so much. The bright colours are Very Good For Me.

With my knitting is Miss Mouse's bookmark that she made at the local library's special storytime/craft session on National Libraries Day - the kids coloured in two bits of bookmark (front and back), stuck them together, then the librarian laminated it for them. I love that library!

*To Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum.

Randomness

It's been an unfocussed and somewhat random week. I haven't really felt able to blog about anything in particular. So I'm following the example of a friend from a forum who occasionally does a Random Thoughts post about the weird things that have been crossing her mind.

- Here's a slightly odd (and not very good, though if you click on it you should get a closer look) photograph from the other day.



We were in bright sunshine while not very far further down was thick fog. It looked for all the world like an inland sea with islands sticking up here and there. In fact the islands are hills and mountains to the north-west, and between us and them is Glasgow. It was a bit like that bit in Ponyo when the sea rises.

- Yellow tulips bringing sunshine to the kitchen:

I like photographing flowers on the windowsill but it does make me notice how many splashes there on the window. Oh dear. I do clean it now and then but it's quite awkward reaching across the sink and it never remains splash-free for long.

- Tomorrow I'm going on a school trip with the Boy's class again - should be interesting! It's to do with their Ancient Egypt topic. I've never been particularly interested in the ancient Egyptians for some reason so don't know a huge amount about them, so I expect I'll learn something too.

- You know, I'm too tired even to remember what my random thoughts have been. What a non-post! But never mind - I find with blogging that the longer it is between posts, the harder it is to write anything, so better to babble inanely (from my point of view) than write nothing at all. For the reader of course it might be an entirely different matter!

Burning yer boats

Hurray, January's finished! And it finished on a Tuesday meaning that last night was Up Helly Aa, always the last Tuesday in January, so I was over at my brother's house watching the webcast of the procession. There were technical issues (possibly at our end, or possibly due to the volume of viewers) so it was a bit laggy and the broadcast failed just as the torches were about to go into the galley, but despite that it was the next best thing to Being There. I took some more pictures of the tv screen (that one above is about the best) but they didn't come out well so I'll give you a link to some pictures on the BBC news website, and the Shetland News article on the event (if you scroll down to the bottom there's a link to Billy Fox's pictures of the day too). Considering that the procession and galley-burning is just the start of a very long night of celebration (one of my friends updated Facebook to say she was just off to bed at 6 o' clock this morning) it's very impressive that there are pictures online already.

So, that's January gone. Thank goodness. I lost my camera on Sunday. I think it fell out of my bag on the train into Glasgow. Nobody has handed it in to Lost Property at the station. I would if I found a camera, but perhaps I'm in the minority. I hope the git that's acquired it enjoys my pictures - my daughter posing proudly with her dance exam certificates, for example. I hope they're bored to tears by my photographs of apple crumble and of streetlight reflections on icy puddles. I'm a bit peeved. I'm using My Beloved's camera now and it's just not as good. *sigh*

February has started with my daughter's class assembly - their topic was Chinese New Year and they did an excellent presentation. It was lovely. They all looked so tiny, but there they were reciting quite complicated lines, and they all spoke so clearly and looked as if they were having fun. It cheered me up no end. Also it's a cold, clear sunny day, and that helps no end!

Reasons To Be Cheerful

I've got to say, I'm struggling with Reasons To Be Cheerful this week. There are Reasons To Feel A Bit Swamped, Reasons To Be Mildly Anxious, Reasons To Need More Sleep, but.. Reasons To Be Cheerful? Well, it's not coming naturally. That's not to say I'm feeling depressed or anything, there's nothing wrong, I'm just Not Cheerful as such. I've even been Too Tired To Knit.

However, there are Reasons To Smile.

1) Watching Warehouse 13 - our new addiction. We'd seen the Eureka/Warehouse 13 crossover ('Crossing Over') so thought we'd try Warehouse 13 itself, and very enjoyable it is too. Fun programme with plenty of geekiness. Yes, just right. We've watched Seasons 1 and 2 in about a week and a half.

2) Daffodils. I have a pot of Tête-à-Tête daffs that I bought in a supermarket last year, and after they'd finished flowering the pot just sat in a corner outside the back door. I'd intended to re-plant the bulbs in the garden but the pot got shoved behind something else and forgotten about. Until a few days ago when I noticed green shoots coming up from that little pot. I brought it inside on Wednesday and on Thursday the first flower appeared! Yay!



3) Apple crumble. Mmmmmmmm.

4) Just thought of a fourth Reason. It was beautifully clear last night so the kids and I went out (well wrapped up, it was baltic out there) in the back garden to look at the stars just before bedtime. I've finally got round to buying a planisphere so we have more idea where to look and what we're looking at. The Orion nebula (fuzzy blob in Orion's sword) was more obvious last night - usually the light pollution here makes it hard to see - and the Boy was really pleased about that. Miss Mouse just likes looking for patterns and making up constellations! I also found our binoculars which was helpful - I can't see a thing through a telescope but if I shut one eye, binoculars work quite well for me.

The sky

I finished my brother's fingerless mitts last night - these were the ones that were supposed to be his Christmas present but I was still bogged down in the cable bit come Christmas Day. Once past the cable bit they fairly flew off the needles and last night I finally settled down to tackle the thumb which is my least favourite bit of mitten/glove-knitting because I'm quite nit-picky about the neatness of it and hate an untidy thumb! But being a bit of a fiddly thing to knit in the round getting them neat takes a bit of effort.

I'm pleased with the result though - the wool (a discontinued Rowan one I think) was an ideal choice for the pattern (Stephen West's Coler from Westknits 2) and I love that blue. I wish the sky was that blue - it just makes me think of skies and sea whenever I look at it. Gorgeous... Unfortunately the actual sky is a flat heavy grey with snow coming out of it just now, wet snow that's only just beginning to lie. Ooops, made myself shiver there!

No time for Reasons To Be Cheerful today so I'll do that tomorrow (loving the thought of pencilling 'Cheerful' into my diary for tomorrow!).

hearts and stars

I made a heart yesterday. I'm not sure if it's a very small pin-cushion or if I'll attach a ribbon and hang it up somewhere (Miss Mouse has her eye on it - she wants it to be a pillow for her teddy, but it's really too small for that). The idea was to brighten up miserable January with a bit of colour, and I thought a few hearts in cheery colours might do the trick!

It was cold and clear on Sunday night so the Boy and I went out into the garden to look at the stars. We didn't have a hope of seeing the aurora as the glow of Glasgow is to the north of us, but we did get a good view of Orion and I was pretty pleased with myself for finding Cassiopeia. And as he was interested, yesterday I showed the Boy various aurora pictures online - some cracking ones on the Shetland News report and Paula Moss Photography. When I was a kid I used to find the northern lights a bit creepy - I remember standing at our door once watching it then having the urge to run back inside. It does look a bit like a dodgy special effect in a film I suppose! I do kick myself a bit now, that I lived in a place with reasonably dark skies (though the flare-stack at the oil terminal did affect that) and more opportunity for aurora-watching than most places in Britain, yet I didn't stand still, watch and make a point of remembering these moments. Especially when so many of my friends now I'm on the mainland say that they'd love to see an aurora. There's nothing like being irrationally irritated with your former self!

More reasons to be cheerful!

I'm always slow with my Reasons To Be Cheerful (Planet Penny usually starts the cheerfulness ball rolling on a Wednesday or a Thursday) so today I'm going to cram in three super-quick reasons while having my coffee, before going to get the kids from school.

*deep breath*

1) Stargazing Live - granted I didn't get to watch it actually live ('Kids! Go. To. Bed!') but either on delay or on iplayer, but ah, how I enjoyed it! Thought-provoking, funny, fascinating, intriguing. Shame it's so often cloudy here, particularly in January.
Oh, I took this picture last week on a clear evening (well, afternoon really).

I watched the 2nd programme on iplayer with the Boy yesterday and he was mostly fascinated and is quite keen that we take his telescope up to Granny and Grandpa's next time we go as we'll get more of a dark sky there.

2) Flowers! Yes, more :-D. My tulips are past their best now but I've hung onto them for their weird sculptural shapes and rich colours:

but I've also got some daffs! Excuse my excessive enthusiasm for a moment but I love daffodils - the colour, the shape, the smell:
.. the shadows they cast on themselves..

Buying flowers is a bit of an indulgence but so worth it when the sun comes out briefly and the windowsill just lights up with colour.

3) Shade cards:

That's the Jamieson's one

All those colours, all those possibilities! I've been playing about with knitters' graph paper this week, doing some Fair Isle/colourwork designs. It's not something I've really done before (the designing that is) but is very absorbing. I've got a few ideas in my head at the moment so the shade card, aside from being a thing of beauty in its own right, is a way of focussing the ideas a bit in terms of colours and how they work together. And seeing the colours is quite inspirational too. Sorry, went off in a daydream there..

Right, gotta go!