Ruins and Being Organised

The ruins pictures are just because I want there to be a nice picture at the top of the post in case I don't get post for weeks (again). And also because the pictures were taken last Sunday on a particularly nice day, so why not? The ruins in question are Bothwell Castle, some bits 13th century, some 14th, so it's doing all right really!

The kids have been back at school for two weeks now. The Boy Child is settling into high school - it's a big change from primary school but he seems to be adjusting quite quickly, and Miss M is adjusting to not having him at the same school as her. Not that they saw much of each other, but she knew he was there! So new routines all round. I'm due to start my next (and last) Open University course at the start of October so I'm looking at ways to be more organised. For the moment I'm trying to get all the course reading done before the course starts - some things are easier than others. I'm 40% through Gulliver's Travels at the moment and it's slow going, whereas As You Like It only took a couple of days.

I'm a great one for list-making. I am a pen and paper person when it comes to getting organised, although I use my phone and tablet for appointment reminders and so on. A while back I came across a mention of bullet journalling, which is a bit like making to do lists but with different symbols for different things. It can get very complicated and I'm wary of that - it could be a big timesuck, which is hardly the point - but I've taken elements of it so that I can keep track of things done, things started, things no longer necessary, and things moved to another day.

I did a search for bullet journalling on the wonderful world of Pinterest and discovered all sorts of amazing complicated systems involving multiple colours of felt-tip pens, loads of symbols and quite unfeasibly neat handwriting! Hmm. So the picture above is the reality of my own version, complete with post-it notes for other things to keep track of (shopping list, theme list for a picture-a-day group I'm a member of, that kind of thing). It's simple and not very pretty, but is working for me, especially on days when I have lots of not-very-big things I want to get done but might easily forget because they're essentially boring, or when there are things I need to get the kids to. I always start with 'Kids to school' so that I can tick something off at the start of the day!

So there we are, the start of a new academic year and all the resolutions that entails!

*phew*

Computer is fixed - well, for now at least. Hurray for My Beloved and his tech skillz! I finally got to look at my holiday photos and thought I'd mention the day we went to Kellie Castle, which is an NTS property fairly near Pittenweem, should anybody be in the vicinity. The kids were fairly unimpressed with it as a castle and to be fair it's really more of a tower house with bits added - to them a castle is something like Stirling Castle or Bothwell castle, spoilt brats that they are! I'd been there once before, years ago when I was a student and my parents were visiting and took me out for the day. It was the middle of winter and only the garden was open, but even at that time of year the garden was enjoyable to visit. To see it in August was pretty amazing. It's just my kind of garden - masses of plants, new things to see around every corner, and a formal structure with enthusiastically informal plants.

We wandered around for ages and to be honest I could have stayed for a lot longer, but the kids' patience in gardens is limited. So far.

*sigh* Not much to say, I'm just enjoying looking at the flowers again! I should have taken my good camera with me but I was already laden with other stuff (sun hats, sunglasses, umbrella...) so just had my little compact camera in my pocket. It's an excellent little camera but has acquired a mark on the lens that I can't remove and I assume is a scratch, so some of the pictures appear a bit smudgy in the middle.

After we'd mooched round the garden for a while we went and found the adventure playground, small but excellent, and the kids were able to burn off some energy. Then we headed in to look at the house itself. Miss M, thankfully, decided to do one of the picture quizzes which was great because it really slowed her down and let us have a proper look. It's an interesting house and worth taking slowly.

And that's it really! A nice day out, especially as it was sunny and the garden was looking beautiful.

bronzed

We had a day out today. Miss M was going to her first gymnastics competition, so we headed east to West Lothian and the sun (a little bit). Not being enthused about sitting watching gymnastics, the gentlemen of the family wandered off to visit Linlithgow Palace - the Boy is keen on castles and stuff and was looking at it in Minecraft terms as 11-year-olds are inclined to do - and it's probably just as well, as the competition over-ran, as such things often do from what I can gather.  Must remember to take a cushion next time. I took my knitting but didn't have enough elbow room for knitting as it was quite busy and I was wedged in between two dads. It did drag on a bit*, but Miss M and her partners (she does acro gymnastics as part of a trio) got a bronze medal in their category so that was a nice end to it. She's knackered though - they didn't do their routine until fairly near the end so she had a long time to get nervous.

When we got home it had obviously been hailing and the forecast says snow over the next few days. I can't say I'm enthusiastic about it turning colder again, but just now I have a large and radiantly warm cat asleep on my legs so that's okay.


* not the gymnastics bits so much as the judging. It hadn't occurred to me how much arithmetic they need to do! Makes sense of course - they wouldn't want to get it wrong.

St. Andrews bliss

So it's the tail end of the school holidays - the kids are back to school on Wednesday. And although it's been a great summer, I think they're quite happy to be going back really. Normally I'd be quite relived  - being chief finder-of-interesting-and-fun-things-to-do for seven weeks takes its toll, and I am pretty tired I admit, but it's been so much fun this year. Partly because we had a lot of good weather, and partly because the kids are a bit older and better able to entertain themselves.

Last week we had our final fling and headed off to St.Andrews for a few days of pottering. We stayed in the same place as last year, a hall of residence, though finally finally it's got rid of the ridiculously short-sighted name of New Hall (it was built when I was a student) and is now Agnes Blackadder Hall, after Agnes Forbes Blackadder who, in 1895, was the first woman to graduate from St.Andrews University and went on to become a doctor of some note - more information here. It's a good name, though I suspect part of its popularity is due to the opportunity for many many Baldrick jokes!

 We did a lot of nothing much - some time spent on the East Sands rock-pooling...

 ..some paddling, quite a lot actually, even the Boy joined in - those are his feet there..

.. some eating of ice-creams. Or sorbet in my case. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

One evening the Boy and I went for a wander out towards the hall I lived in during my first-year. It's no longer there, thankfully, and has been replaced with self-catering 'apartments' which look much pleasanter to live in, but the path to it is just as lovely as it ever was.  That field was one of my favourite views when I was a student. I saw it in all weathers and conditions.

The next day there was more messing around on rocks, investigating rock pools or pretending to be on a pirate ship:

Also a trip to the aquarium and a visit to the castle. I'd got the kids a drawing book each and the Boy spent a lot of time drawing plans of the castle, while Miss M wrote lists of rooms and other points of interest.

She particularly likes the mine and countermine, which are a siege mine and the tunnel dug by the besieged to meet it.  She got her daddy to take her down the tunnels several times. From inside the castle you go down the countermine which is very low-ceilinged and truly unpleasant until you climb down a short ladder into the mine, which has a higher ceiling and is generally more spacious as those digging in from outside had better equipment and so on. From that point steps lead up until they eventually stop at a wall, which I imagine stops you ending up in somebody's cellar, and there's a small manhole in the ceiling letting a bit of light in. I don't think Miss M is all that interested in the history really, it's more the 'secret passages' thing. Unfortunately I'm claustrophobic (hence the mine/countermine being a job for daddy!) and have never actually got further than the short ladder bit, but I've just watched this Youtube video that shows what it's like (the second half, on the way back from the far end, has better lighting so you get more idea what it's like). Hurray for the Intertubes! I can't imagine I'll ever get to the end of the tunnel myself, but at least I know what it's like now! Dark mostly.

I think that's our last time at the hall as sharing a family room is so tiring, especially when the youngest gets overtired after eight o'clock and we all have to go to bed early, but maybe a holiday cottage or something next year, if we go back. Shame really as breakfast there was fantastic, but decent sleep is even more so!

Summery/summary

 I've been too hot to blog :-D. Never thought I'd get to say that!  We have had a heatwave, though not as hot as down south (and apparently Scotland doesn't officially get heatwaves, in that we don't get a heatwave warning - 'code red - drink water, stat!' - in the way that England does) but that's probably as well or I'd just melt. And it's all relative anyway - unaccustomed as we are to sunshine and heat, pushing into the mid 20s deg C is a bit of a shocker.  It started, conveniently enough, the week that My Beloved had a week off work and we did 'staycation' things, i.e. what used to be called 'going out for the day'.  Such as Largs (above and below) - it was tremendously sunny and the Boy and I were scuttling from one patch of shade to the next. My Beloved and Miss M cope better with the heat. But we had loads of drinks, went to the playpark (where Miss M scared the living daylights out of me by climbing to the very top of the very high climbing frame), watched the ferries come and go (though not talking of Michelangelo), paddled, looked for sea-glass, ate ice-creams and sorbets and then came home.

 Then a couple of days later we went to Stirling Castle..

 ..which is always fun. Miss M joined in the excellent children's tour and to her delight got to be the queen (had a plastic tiara plonked on her head).  The Boy happily drew plans of the castle and tried to work out if he could build it in Minecraft.

The day after that we went to Edinburgh, parked in a park & ride carpark on the outskirts (nobody in their right mind drives in Edinburgh when they're unfamiliar with it - not more than once anyway), got the bus into the city centre and went to the castle. Now this would have been a tremendous disappointment if we weren't Historic Scotland members and would therefore have had to queue for a while and pay a lot to get in. As it was, we are members and got fast-tracked in so it didn't matter that we didn't really enjoy it. I think the problem is it's such a martial castle, and if you're not into military history, well, it's just a rock on a hill. It's all very well presented and the staff were pleasant and helpful but it just didn't grab us. As my Beloved commented Stirling Castle is all 'come and see how much fun history is' but Edinburgh Castle is more 'come and be impressed by our history'. We had our picnic, admired the views, were there for the one o'clock gun, mooched around for a bit trying to be interested, then gave up and pottered back down the hill. I took the picture above in Ramsay Lane which takes you down from Castlehill to the Mound, purely because I liked the shape of the metal balustrade.

Since that week it has stayed hot, which has been, well, weird. We've been out and about a bit but have been taking it easy. It's the longest hot spell of Miss M's life - I think it was a fairly nice summer the year she was born, but she was born in October so she missed it and I had all the joy of being pregnant in the summer. A winter pregnancy is much more bearable! It's the longest hot spell in the Boy's memory too, though I remember his first summer being pretty hot at times, such as the day he had his 3-month jabs and it was stifling in the health centre.  All the babies were stripped down to their nappies and they were all miserable even before the needles got near them.

Consequently the kids have got fed up with this heat and having been hoping for rain and cooler weather.

 It has cooled a bit now but has been very muggy so we've had some thunderstorms, luckily in the daytime so no sleep has been disturbed. Miss M was a bit nervy about them initially but has relaxed now. We just switch off the computers if they're on and retreat upstairs to read on the big bed, which is quite peaceful.

 It was lovely on Monday though and my mother-in-law took the kids and me to Culzean Castle.  Actually we didn't go to the castle itself (really more a grand house than a castle) but parked at the far end of the park, next to the play area and the Swan Pond, and then headed down through the trees to the beach, where we had a great time eating our picnic, paddling, exploring the rocks, drawing in the sand and so on.

And the really good thing about the warm weather is that our strawberries are doing well this year!

Mmm, delicious.

There's just under three weeks left of the school holidays - it's gone so fast, I suppose partly because we've packed so much into it for once. So much a for a knitting-ish blog though - it's been too warm for much knitting!

Last Weekend

 Is it Petra? (no, not the Blue Peter dog, the rose-red city..)

 

Actually it's Bothwell Castle in the sunshine, which as near as we'll get to Petra just now - pretty rose-red though!  I was very impressed with the colour in this corridor.  These are pictures from last Sunday when we went out on a making-use-of-our-Historic-Scotland membership expedition - hence Bothwell Castle, which is pretty local for us.

 

The graffiti is quite thought-provoking - at what point does graffiti stop being an eyesore and start being historical? While My Beloved and Miss Mouse were busy climbing to the Highest Room of the Tallest Tower and finding no Fiona, no Shrek and indeed no gender-confused wolf, the Boy and I had fun looking for the earliest graffiti we could.  'JA Howarth 1880' (?) isn't the earliest, just the clearest picture I got.  The Viking runic graffiti in Maes Howe is definitely historical, and I'm inclined to count the older graffiti in Bothwell Castle as such too, and for the silliest of reasons - serifs! JA Howarth isn't the best example of this unfortunately, but the Victorian visitors put a bit of effort into carving their names for posterity, actually carving their names quite deeply and neatly with serifs on their letters - more modern names are just scratched in, looking if anything more runic. So there you go, I think those Victorians deserve a little recognition for their effort!

This is the view from where we sat on some steps and ate our sandwiches, trying to imagine what the castle used to look like. And trying not to see the scaffolding. Every time we've been to Bothwell Castle there has been scaffolding, and I'm never very sure if work is being done on the castle or if the scaffolding is just holding it all up (that's in my more paranoid moments), though there is access further up the tower now than there was last time we visited so maybe it's the former.

The man in the ticket-office/shop let us into one of the rooms under the great hall to look at their education stuff - re-enactment-type weapons and armour, as well as some nice models of siege engines. The Boy was quite taken with the shiny stuff.  Bit like his father then.

Then we went for a walk round the outside - Bothwell Castle sits above the River Clyde and the ground drops moderately steeply on the river side of the castle, but it's a nice little walk around, especially on such a nice day.  The Peacock butterfly posed nicely for us - I almost got a closer picture but it flew away suddenly and I was left with a picture of a rock.

Growing in the cracks of the castle walls were this plant, which I've tried to identify without much luck.  I've been right through my wild-flower book and though I can find similar flowers, they have different leaves. But whatever it is, it was growing abundantly in cracks and looked beautiful in the sunshine.

I took loads of pictures with the sky in them because the contrast with the red stone was lovely and also because, well, it's Blue Sky!  I make a point of taking pictures of all the nice days.

This weekend has been rather quieter - but I got a bit of my knitting mojo back. I picked up a sock I'd started knitting, ooh, ages ago and had given up on because the wool was depressing me. It's a variegated one, and I'm not that keen on variegated wools really but it was cheap and I just wanted to knit a pair of socks with cheap wool 'til I got the hang of them. But the main problem is the colours which I'd though were shades of blue when I bought it (online of course) but really are shades of murky blue and grey and the whole thing is just too dreich. But today I picked it up again, finished turning the heel and knitted a substantial part of the foot - I think it helped that today was moderately sunny again. Those colours were just more than I could face in the winter!

Interesting link  - 'intensive laser scanning' of Maes Howe!

In which I blog at warp speed

Gratuitous blossom picture

In an attempt to fight blogger's block, today I shall be blogging as quickly as I can. It turns out the new system for composing on Blogger makes this a bit tricky. It turns out in fact, that the engines cannae take it...

Anyway, setting that aside (but why mess with something that worked perfectly well, eh?), last Saturday we took a trip to Stirling castle (again) - we hadn't been there since they reopened the palace part so it was a bit different this time.

There's Miss Mouse being a lion in the Lion's Den. This is a weird little sloping courtyard in the middle of the palace building, where a lion was supposedly, possibly, once kept. Apparently royalty used to like to give each other lions. A Lion is for Life not just for Christmas, kids!

Miss M's favourite bit was down in the vaults where there are lots of interactive things for children to do - this was the costume room:

They had costumes in various sizes, though alas not 'grown-up'.

One of the lovely things about Stirling Castle is that it's a great castle for exploring - lots of levels, steps up and down and paths going round and coming out where you don't expect them. Note in the 'vault' picture that there is window looking down on another area!

Our favourite find was this wee chap:

Why is he there? Is he somebody's geocache? He's a man on a mission certainly - a secret one, he's nearly invisible.

I'll finish there - this post has taken 45 minutes (!) and I need to go to get the kids from school now.  If anyone knows a way in which I can work on the text at the same time as uploading a picture on Blogger, please tell me - this could get really frustrating :-(.

Something possessed me to go on a school trip

Yeah, and when I saw this morning's weather I was regretting volunteering. Because the trip was to Stirling Castle (holy deja vu Batman!) - you know, up on a nice exposed hill. But actually once we were there it was, well, not so bad. Chilly obviously but not snowy and mostly bright. Oh hang on, you don't want to hear me ramble about the weather, do you? Though it had quite an impact on the day as shivering seven-year-olds are not shy about making their feelings known! Anyway I took a few pictures in the chapel of the so-far completed tapestries - remember my ramble about these from my last Stirling Castle post?

A slightly closer shot:


School-children are really tiring aren't they? It was a good day though. Highlights were managing to find the spending money one boy had managed to chuck in the bin along with the leftovers from his lunch (rummaging through the bin-bag was not a highlight but he was so relieved to find it), and even better the surreal sight we saw from the bus on the way home - thousands upon thousands of beercans by the side of the road. We were heading back several hours after it happened so what we passed was the clean-up. I've (obviously) never seen so many cans of Stella.

Where was I?

Looks rather Mediterranean don't you think? Stirling Castle actually..

The Great Hall on the right there has been restored and has a very pretty peachy limewash exterior (some information here, isn't Google amazing!) which looks to modern eyes most un-Scottish. You can see it a long way off too, especially in the sunshine. Most of the castle is greyish stone as you see from the Chapel on the left-hand-side of that photo, and the castle sits on a grey hill in the middle of a plain. And there's that peachy confection sitting in the middle of it :-).

We had a great time wandering around - the kids loved that it's a proper castle-y castle with weird stairways leading in odd directions and lots of exploring to be done. In fact sections of it are inaccessible at the moment as there's work being done on them..

.. and entry is cheaper at the moment due to that, but there was plenty to occupy all of us. My favourite bit and the thing I was most desperate to photograph (but couldn't due to 'no photography' signs) was the Tapestry Studio.

There it is at the end of that row of buildings - the little purpose-built building at the end. In there they're weaving recreations of the Unicorn Tapestries - so fascinating and so much to see. I was there at one o'clock when the weaver present downed tools for a little while to explain about the project. She said each tapestry takes approximately four years - the one they're working on at the moment, this one I think, is nearly finished with only a few months to go. At the moment they're about at that man with the rich red velvety-looking sleeve on the right-hand side (as tapestries are worked on their sides). Ever since we moved to the Glasgow area I've loved the tapestries in the Burrell Collection so to see similar things in the process of being woven was brilliant. In looking for links about the Burrell's tapestries I found this blog post which details a trip by the Burrell Tapestry folk to the Tapestry Studio at Stirling Castle and includes a couple of pictures of the studio.

So that was my highlight but we all had a great time. Miss Mouse and I liked this chilly-looking mermaid on the Great Hall.

The last time we'd been to Stirling Castle was for a re-enactment event seven-and-a-half years ago when the Boy was just a Tiddler:

Here he is being a Mediaeval Baby! But as is often the case with re-enactment events we didn't see anything of the place apart from the bit we were in, in that case the 'Bowling Green' area near the entrance:

It was great to see the rest of the place. A Grand Day Out for all of us.