Going wild on our birthday

 No, I'm not using the Royal 'we' - as well as my 42nd birthday it was the Boy's tenth birthday, ooh double figures!  And it was a glorious day too - we were in the Highlands again visiting my parents for the long weekend, so we all went to the Highland Wildlife Park for the day. There was still snow on the mountains but it was hot (that's Scottish hot, probably just tepid to Californians and similar, but the kind of day on which peely-wally Scots get just a bit pink-and-singed-looking). The camels looked quite relaxed and sleepy. I think that's a yak in the background. A yakground. Or possibly it's a spy-sheep in a mac. Incognito.

Another camel catching some rays:

This is a rare sight, the saltire against an actually properly blue sky:

Well, it's rare in the soggy bit of Scotland which I inhabit anyway. My family mock me for my habit of taking photos of blue skies but it's good to relish them and even better to look back at the pictures when it's grey, wet and generally dreich. Look! It's so bluuuuuue!

That's the view across the snow monkey enclosure. I'm relaxing just looking at it.

Like Eliza Stickleback, I was also taking pictures of the 'wrong' things - such as lapwings and oystercatchers in the bit of the park you drive through. Well, the bison and suchlike were further away from the road. And I like birds, especially oystercatchers but my oystercatcher picture is a bit blurred.

I indulged myself with a pink drink with my picnic - rose lemonade! I'd never seen or, obviously, drunk it before but it was too pretty not to have as a birthday drink, don't you think? 'Weird but nice' is my summary. The Boy tried a bit and agreed.

A very nice day indeed. I was quite happy to be 42 (in recent years I've not been keen on the new number but 42 is different) and the Boy seemed quite pleased to be ten. Even if I kept muttering 'you can't be ten, you were just a baby a minute ago' and other similarly parental things.

Forty-two

That being a number I'm imminently to become acquainted with.  So what else can I do but treat myself to some nice yarn (Sparkleduck Pulsar -55% Bluefaced Leicester, 45% silk) with an appropriate colour name (Looking for the Whales) and knit a Hitchhiker:

Twelve points down, thirty to go!

I've been very lax about blogging this month - partly because it's a very busy month with three birthdays as well as all the other stuff May brings but mostly because I've had the worst cold I've had in years and have just been lurching through each day before going to bed early. Sometimes soldiering on just doesn't achieve anything. I've been doing a fair bit of (easy) knitting though, such as finishing Snowy the polar bear's blanket. No pic because I'm doing this on the netbook and it's a bit of a faff finding and resizing pictures - you wouldn't believe how long it took me to sort that Hitchhiker picture! 

I have so many squillion things to blog about but now I'm here can I think what any of them were? 'Course not!  Here's to regular blogging. Shortly  :-).

Star Wars Day

I'm a bit rubbish at this blogging malarkey at the moment. You know why? Constant interruptions. For example, I wrote the first line of this post seven hours ago. They're not deliberate interruptions by any means, but it does mean I lose my train of thought. Hmm, I'm starting to feel jinxed.

Anyway, happy Star Wars Day! Which by very happy geeky coincidence is My Beloved's birthday - couldn't be more apt really, though actually none of his geeky presents were Star Wars ones. My secret knitting of the last few weeks was this:

A Jayne hat

Oh, so much fun to knit! I've been doing quite a bit of 4-ply knitting this year so the gorgeous squishy aran-weight Drops Nepal and 4mm needles were a real pleasure to work with. And making a pompom is always fun :-D.

I've also knitted a blanket for Miss Mouse's teddy:

That was using Drops Nepal again, bought the same day I got the Jayne colours.  I took Miss Mouse with me on a trip to the Yarn Cake woolshop/cafe last week and let her choose some more from the wall of woolly goodness, for another blanket for Snowy this time, her polar bear teddy: 

She always chooses interesting colour combinations ( you should see her when she's given free rein to dress herself) and I really wasn't sure about these colours together

but she was insistent that 'this is what Snowy likes', and actually now that I'm knitting them up into squares they're looking quite good together.  While were up in the wilds of the west end of Glasgow (necessitating a trip on the underground, the first time for Miss M*) we took a detour through the botanic gardens and had a quick mooch around the Kibble Palace:

Miss M was getting tired and fed-up by this point but I love the swooshy shapes in the greenhouse. Greenhouse is too domestic a word for it really, it's more like how I'd imagine a Victorian spaceship. Lovely place.

* Wide-eyed the night before: 'Will we see icky worms and things?'