spawn, spring, other words beginning with sp* (*probably not really)

The frogs have spawned again! My Beloved's response to this was 'That's brave of them - the forecast isn't good' (apparently there is to be more snow, depending on which forecast you look at). I'm not sure if he thinks the frogs consult the weather forecast before embarking on following their reproductive instincts. In any case, frog spawn is pretty robust stuff.

However, delighted as I am to see evidence of new life in our garden, I'm back to the annual worry about tadpole welfare. Our pond is tiny and is currently pretty much filled with frogspawn and not much water, as despite various batches of snow we haven't had much actual rain recently, and I suspect the pond 'liner', a plastic tub, may be leaking. So I find myself hoping for plentiful April showers so that they eventual taddies have somewhere to actually swim, and considering installing another tiny pond. Maybe eventually I'll have a chain of tiny ponds across the garden. Actually this wouldn't take long. I bought a magazine the other day that had a supplement called something like 'tips for small gardens' and on opening it could only conclude that their idea of small gardens and mine do not even feature on the same Venn diagram, let alone overlap.

In knitting news, I finished the green hat I started in January, and also the camera pouch.

And now I'm knitting a shawl (the Age of Brass and Steam Kerchief) from some Malabrigo Rios which I got a while back. I have reached the stage of eternally long rows but I want it to be a proper shawl rather than a kerchief (not that I'm clear what a kerchief is, but it sounds small) so I'm adding at least one extra repeat, so there is some way to go. Good telly knitting though!

Talking of which, in the interest of doing things as a family, even if it's only watching telly together, we are currently working our way through all the episodes of Scrapheap Challenge available on All4. Miss M is mechanically minded and the Boy is keen on science in general, and we'd watched all the Mythbusters and White Rabbit Project episodes available on Netflix so we were really pleased to find Scrapheap as well. Inspired by all this we finally got round to trying the Diet Coke/Mentos thing last week - we completely forgot to take pictures, but they would have been rubbish anyway as we were falling about laughing!

More frogs

So this is the picture I took yesterday morning, with the amazing zoom, from an upstairs window:

The other two I took were slightly blurry but I'm more than happy with how sharp this one is. And then this morning I went out and had a look and there's another pile of spawn, though no sign of frog or frogs. Our pond is just a plastic garden tub sunk in the ground with gravel, aquatic compost and plants added. It's not big or fancy - in fact it's probably only about 50cm across - but year after year it gets spawned in. That's quite flattering when you're trying to make your garden wildlife friendly. As far as I know none of the tadpoles matured last year, but this year I managed to clear some of the old sludge and weed out of the water before the frog returned so there's a bit more space and I hope that will help. Although I read somewhere that frogs like shallow water and will even lay their spawn in puddles, which seems staggeringly short-sighted of them!

It turns out my blog-composing issue is in Firefox (probably an outdated version, though to be honest I can never see why something that always has worked should suddenly not work) but not in Chrome so I've used Chrome for this. It's very much easier than trying to post from my tablet, so I'm glad I figured it out.

Spawned

Frogspawned that is.

I can still post from my tablet but that means using the camera on my tablet, which is a shame because I took a picture of the spawning in action this morning with my actual camera. From the Boy's bedroom window, i.e. upstairs. The zoom on that camera is amazing! And I was really pleased with the pictures I got but I haven't time to mess with html just now so I'll just go with this one. Thus spake the Frog - Spring is happening!

In other news, I've been missing studying so I'm doing a free online course about moons (it's an OU one but I'm doing it via Futurelearn), and it's fascinating. I've had an interest in space and astronomy for a long time, and already had a favourite moon (Enceladus), but not much of a science background academically-speaking, so it's interesting and pushing me a bit. It's supposed to take about three hours studying time a week, but the first week took me much longer because there were some things to do with orbits that it took me a while, and some juggling of apples, to get my head around. The second week was more geology-related (what the moons are made of*, and craters) and I found that much easier, probably thanks to my dad's interest in geology. So I think the study time will very quite a bit from week to week.

I suppose I'd better go and feed the family now..

* Green cheese with a core of Stilton and a Brie mantle. Of course.

The Frog Returns

Well, I seem to be having problems posting to my blog from my computer, so apologies if this looking funny - but, yay, the frog is back! It seems I cleaned out the pond just in time and hopefully there's enough water in it for her! I do have a picture waiting to be added to this post but it doesn't seem to be letting me, for reasons I can't fathom yet.

Edit: I've finally added it the old-fashioned way of my youth, using actual HTML. And a chisel probably. I hope it looks okay. I'm off to whittle something..

I was doing quite well for a bit there

Blog-wise, I mean. Still, I got through January, and I must have blinked and missed February, or mislaid it somewhere - probably down the back of the settee.. But I'm back and it's March, the days are getting longer and the weather is occasionally pleasant. I sat on the back doorstep drinking my coffee yesterday. The sun was shining and just there it was reasonably sheltered from the (rather chilly) wind, and it was... pleasant.

Also pleasant is that Miss M found my missing pencil sharpener, so I've just sharpened some pencils. Small pleasures.

That is easily the best sharpener I've ever had (it's the Spanish company, Milan, if anybody's stationery nerdy), so I'd missed it. I've just sharpened another nine, just for the fun of it - this is clearly the House of Blunt Pencils.

Springy

It was a beautiful day today, sunny and relaxed. Sometimes I feel as if I've been cold for months but today was bliss. We're not talking tropical, just nicely warm for once!  My Beloved was off doing the Yorkhill Easter Egg Run, a motorbike event which raises money for Yorkhill hospital, and the kids and I went to the Museum of Rural Life with my mother-in-law and my brother. We saw my Favourite Tree:

And lots of lambs, these two only about an hour old:

You don't get much more springy than that!

Before we went out I'd done an Easter Egg hunt for the kids again. As usual the clues were in rhyme. Very bad rhyme. I'm rather regretting doing that the first time because if I don't do it now I'll feel I'm not trying hard enough. The kids did say it didn't have to rhyme though. It's just me putting pressure on myself - ridiculous! :-D

They were good bad rhymes though!


Also the sock progresses:

Actually since then I've turned the heel - it's really fun knitting, this. So quick - hurray for small feet! I think this may be my quickest ever sock actually. There's nothing like an instant gratification project..

It's been a lovely weekend. Although I've still been getting some studying in, the pace has been much more leisurely for the last couple of days. I do like a bit of leisure.

Ma!

I actually thought I was too sleepy to blog tonight but Cat1 has fallen asleep on my legs as I sit at the computer so I may be here a while. And as I'm here, I'll show you pictures from a walk the Boy and I took this afternoon. It was a really lovely day (and why couldn't we have got weather like this yesterday morning during the eclipse, eh?), one of several lovely days this week and it's definitely feeling spring-like. We'd only been walking for five minutes when we heard bleating and as we came round a corner saw a field of ewes and lambs. The lambs were running around shouting 'Ma! Ma!' ('Look at me Ma!' 'Yeah, whatever' says Ma) and generally having fun.

We stood and watched for a bit then moved on.

The light was beautiful as it was quite late afternoon.

And we stopped and admired the view, noticed interesting things and took photographs. The Boy is excellent company on a walk.

Actually he's excellent company any time! I'm aware I tend to talk more about Miss M because she does more activities and is generally more outgoing, but in his quiet way the Boy is lots of fun too. He has a very quirky sense of humour! One of the best things about this week has been watching Stargazing Live, which they timed this year to coincide with the eclipse, and what's been even better has been watching it snuggled up with the Boy who has been keen on space for years. He'd watched bits of Stargazing Live in previous years but this was the year he started to really enjoy it and understand it - not all of it obviously, some of it's pretty technical and way over my head, but it's the enthusiasm of the presenters that carries it.

Ah, pretty good week! Apart from the bits at the dentist. We won't dwell on that.

It could be bunnies

Alas the 99p-bunch-of-daffodils season appears to have come to an end. I have moved onto freesias which I also love and have the advantage of looking great for absolutely ages until you suddenly realise that they've actually completely dried out. The disadvantage is that they're more expensive so I can't get flowers for the kitchen and flowers for the living-room as I do in daffodil season. 

Oh well. I'll console myself with my little bunny tin and tiny chocolate eggs.

We are almost painfully disorganised when it comes to holidays. You know all those people who book their summer holidays ten months in advance? Yeah. Not us. However we have actually got ourselves organised enough for My Beloved to book time off work, for me to book the cattery, and we've even managed to book somewhere to stay.  It's a good job I don't work at the moment though - the thought of co-ordinating his leave, my leave, the cattery and accommodation doesn't bear thinking about. And we're only planning a week in Fife. If we had to factor in stuff like passports, flights or ferries I expect I would crack up. But we are sorted, we are organised, and we are going to have a summer holiday this year. This is good.

Sprung

No, I haven't been sprung from the joint. Nor have I sprung a leak. Nope, what has happened, and it's really most unlikely, is that spring has sprung. We have had two consecutive days of sunshine, blue skies and relative warmth. Two! It's not been raining! Yesterday the kids came running out of school into the balmy 10.5 degree sunshine shedding jackets, cardigans, hoodies like, well, Glaswegians in the spring. And there are yellow things in the garden.

I'm still not feeling 'one hundred per cent' as athletes being interviewed by the BBC always say (shortly after the default athlete sentence opener 'well, I mean..' pronounced 'wellamean'), but a little bit of sunshine certainly helps. And watching Cat1 blissfully expose his belly to the sunlight is both amusing and relaxing. Talking of whom...

Monday afternoon was chaotic.  We were running around getting ready to take Miss M to her dance class, when the doorbell rang and it was a creepily smiling man who wanted to give me a leaflet, not as I initially thought about 'the Good News', but about a service he offered cleaning leather suites. ''Er, no, sorry, we're just going out, bit of a rush.." I muttered shutting the door in his face while simultaneously thinking "I use baby wipes to clean the leather settee, doesn't everyone?"  Maybe specialist leather suite cleaning is a euphemism for something. 

Then we continued to run around like headless chickens, because I couldn't find my keys. That deserves the bold type, it's the kind of thing I get anxiety dreams about. I looked everywhere, even most unlikely places (bathroom), and had the kids searching too, which is usually pointless but worth a try. By this time we're really actually running late and I hate being late. Then as I was looking upstairs for the second time, the kids shouted up "We've found them!"
"Where?" I shrieked, running down the stairs.
"Under the cat."

I'd thrown my keys on the footstool as we'd come in from school and the cat had gone and sat on them. And continued to sit on them while I ran around looking for them. *sigh* Until he got bored and sauntered off.

At times like this I need mindless knitting. Or actually the crochet is good at the moment because it's getting easier and less wonky and therefore more enjoyable, but I still have to concentrate a bit so it takes my mind off whatever my subconscious feels I should be fretting about. But back to knitting and a recent piece of mindless knitting, a facecloth:

I hardly ever knit with cotton as I don't find it the pleasantest thing to knit with, but actually a garter stitch square is fine because you don't need a lot of give in it. What I'd forgotten was what a pain it is finishing off because any ends you weave in promptly unweave themselves and knots tend not to stay knotted*.  So I googled for an answer and found this Youtube video which has an answer that is both clever and so blindingly obvious that I really did want to kick myself. And I hope that if I include the link here I'm more likely to remember it next time.

I can't see a need for a vast number of facecloths but it was a quick enjoyable knit and I learned something useful from it. And at the time I was avoiding a half-turned heel that was not quite right (fixed now - just needed daylight and concentration). It's always handy to have a procrastination knit in the background!

* I'll confess here that although it is considered a cardinal sin on Ravelry to tie in a new piece of yarn, of whatever type, I've done so for years and don't think it matters much if the 'wrong' side is hidden. For example, inside a garment where it's not seen, as long as it's not a huge knot that'll rub, why worry?

Another nice thing

Another nice thing about this time of year is that cut daffodils are so cheap. Usually I feel guilty about buying flowers when they don't last long, even though I know the psychological boost makes the occasional bunch (or in the depths of winter, a regular bunch) worth every penny. At heart I am indeed a stingy Scot, so when it's 99p for a generous bunch of daffs, giving me sunshine in the house, it makes me very happy indeed!  And they're all the better of course when actual sunshine is bouncing off them!

Do you like my jar vases? Most of my vases (oops, Mr.Collins-ing again) are quite tall and/or narrow-necked which doesn't suit short sturdy bunches of daffs, but jars work quite well and suit the casual nature of daffodils I think. I particularly like the one the daffs on the left are in. It contained stir-fry sauce of some type I think and looked very dull with its label on, but now that that's been removed I think it's an interesting shape.

squee!

We went to the National Museum of Rural Life today (as Andamento did the other day). It was the Easter event so there were some special things happening, including..

.. squee! Ducklings! That little finger is Miss Mouse stroking a duckling. I love ducklings - such cool laidback little characters.

Here's one of the hens up at the farm - she come running over to see what we were doing and stuck her beak in the camera.

Spring is doing its stuff now.

That's the Clydesdale in the background, grazing peacefully.

Bit of rope, just because I liked the faded colour and the way it was blowing around.

Blossom-tastic!

We had a great day - well, morning really. I think we were lucky with the weather, it turned pretty wet after we got home. While we were out my Beloved was off at a motorbike thing (the Yorkhill Easter Egg Run) and also acquiring a new motorbike. Not rolling my eyes at all honestly - he got rid of his 125 at the same time after all..