creeping back in

St. Andrews  - East Sands, pier and cathedral

That's been a long break - almost five months..

Things have been hectic and there have been family (and cat) illnesses, and blogging just fell by the wayside. Luckily things are calming down now, so here's the update!

I've finished my Open University degree and will be graduating at the end of October. I got a 2.1 (Upper Second). Again. I already have a 2.1 in Social Anthropology from the Olden Days of my youth. I was very close to getting a First with the OU degree but not quite. And if I hadn't taken that pesky Literature in the Modern World course partway through, maybe I'd have got it, but it turns out I hate 20th century literature. I blame Mrs Dalloway. I'm sure I'm not the first to say that. I am, of course, very happy with a 2.1, but I admit to being just slightly wistful about not getting that First.

The kids are back at school now but we had a pleasant summer - a week in St. Andrews again, a few days in the Highlands visiting Mum and Dad, a lot of lazing around reading.

St.Andrews - North Street at sunset

Falls of Pattack, near Loch Laggan

I started knitting again! I did hardly any knitting over the winter, probably because I was studying a lot, but as soon as I submitted my last assignment at the end of May I picked up the needles again to knit a present for a teacher at Miss M's school who was retiring after 40 years at that school. She's a lovely person who's done so much for the school and the kids, and taught both my children, so I wanted to make her something special. But as she announced her retirement quite suddenly we were all a bit taken by surprise and there wasn't much time! Luckily I'd come across the pattern for this shawlette (Sunburnt by Nidhi Kansal) which is quite quick and straightforward to knit up, even for me. I think I only messed up the lace section once, which is pretty good going for me!

Cat assistance

Modelled by Miss M

I was really pleased with how it turned out, so the next time I'm at the Yarn Cake I'll get some more of the yarn (DROPS Alpaca) in another colour and start one for myself. I also knitted another Boneyard shawl over the summer but I've totally failed to get a photograph of that. Actually it's more Boneyard-esque - I used yarn-overs instead of the left- and right-leaning increases and I completely forgot about the garter ridges.

Okay, none of that sounds very exciting! But the main thing is that everybody is healthy again. 

*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.

Favourite Things

Raindrops on roses poppies (yes, the school holidays have started with torrential rain again)..

Whiskers on kitty..

Dum-di-dee, dum-dee,
Warm woollen mittens, maybe.

Er, can't remember.

Day One of the school holidays and aside from torrential rain, there has been shopping, pottering around, the making of optician's appointments, and, best of all, the receiving of a call from the dentist saying could I come back in so they could refund me because they'd accidentally overcharged me for my root treatment last week. I had no idea how much root treatment cost never having had it before and to be honest I was so spaced out at the time that they could have requested the contents of my bank account, a kidney and my firstborn and I probably wouldn't have noticed. But yay, refund!

So why the singing of Favourite Things? Because this evening I discovered that the freezer door was ajar, had been for some time, and its temperature was 8 deg C. So not so much of the freezing. All of which necessitated clearing everything out, chucking a whole lot of it out, and mopping the floor. And more than a little teeth-grinding, along with quite of lot of stomping around with sotto voce swearing.

Oh well.

Here's a rather brilliant favourite thing though:

My friend L in Vermont has been clearing out her late mother's stuff and has been rehoming all sorts of linens and things, including these beautiful boudoir pillowcases which have come to me. I need to make some small pillows/cushions to fit them, though they're so pretty that part of me would just like to frame them! I may be a total scruff but I do appreciate the pretty stuff too.

Noris

This was the scene last Tuesday, the day before the kids went back to school, when I was looking for every usable pencil I could find. Fortunately there turned out to be a decent stash of my old favourite Staedtler Noris, once I got them rounded up. Those yellow and black stripes with the red end just scream 'school' at me! In a good way, of course. I love 'em, with their bumblebee cheeriness, pleasing smoothness and hexagonal cross-section. There have probably been minor changes in the look of them since I was at school, but to me they look identical. And although I didn't always like school, I always liked the stationery.

The kids were fairly happy to go back to school, though we all agreed that the summer holidays had seemed really short this year - they weren't short, they were seven weeks long, but it did just seem to fly by one way and another, yet we didn't even do an awful lot. I had plenty of ideas and backup plans for stuff to do if it was a rainy summer, but actually there was a lot of good weather and we spent a lot of time mooching around at home. Miss M has a bunch of friends from our street and the one behind so she spent a lot of time playing with them and also falling out with them, seemingly inevitable with little girls, and equally inevitably making loom bands. The Boy was mostly happy bouncing on the trampoline, playing on the computer or reading, and more occasionally playing with friends.

We had a great week in St.Andrews which I will undoubtedly blog about when I've sorted the pictures and got my brain going again. This is just a short post to get me back in the way of blogging after an unexpectedly long break. I don't really know why, except that I just didn't get much computer time or peace and quiet while the kids were at home. Not that they're noisy but I find it difficult to write blog posts when there are interruptions or someone leaning over my shoulder asking what I'm doing. I should be a hermit really. A hermit with wifi.

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.

Falkland Palace in the sun

Small Cat is asleep on my legs. I only sat down at my computer to check a couple of things quickly, but Small Cat decided that standing on my keyboard waving her tail in my face was a good idea. So I put my feet up on the footstool and she promptly settled down on my legs (ha! Pavlov's kitteh!). Of course now I can't move. I just can't. I can't disturb a sleeping cat. It's just wrong.  So I shall write a blog-post instead, or rather I'll finish one which I started a few days ago, all about Falkland Palace.

As we were in no particular hurry coming home from our trip to St. Andrews, we stopped at Falkland Palace on the way.  In fact we arrived early and had a wander round Falkland which was quiet and sleepy and attractive and a bit eerie because no-one was around. There was music and the sound of a vacuum-cleaner coming from a pub/hotel so it wasn't completely silent. We met a very friendly cat and eventually saw someone walking a dog so we were reassured then that the populace hadn't been abducted by aliens.

Eventually we headed to Falkland Palace itself, making use of our newly acquired NTS membership, and we enjoyed it very much which is why it's getting its own blog-post instead of being tacked onto the St. Andrews one.

The palace itself was moderately interesting - it was built by James IV and James V on the site of an older castle and became a country residence for the Stuart monarchs, rather like Balmoral is for the Windsors.   There's not a huge amount to it now really as the East Range was destroyed by fire in 1654, but it must have been pretty impressive at one time.  I'm not really all that gone on the lives of the monarchy or political history, so although it was mildly interesting, my interest was mostly taken by the details of the furnishings - the woodwork and tapestries and the gloomy portraits.  The highlight for us all though, I think, was the garden - we spent ages in it!

The first bit we came to (as you come out of the gift shop building, in the background of that picture) is a courtyard with big chess pieces. And draughts pieces as well if that's your thing. I can't play either game. Miss M and my Beloved quickly became engrossed in a game of chess, so the Boy and I wandered off to look around the garden. I think we came back three or four times and they were still engrossed. When Miss M was telling me about it she said, 'Chess is quite easy really - you just have to know how all the pieces move and work out the best places to move them to and work out where the other person might move their pieces and how that will affect your pieces'.  And that is why I don't play chess. Still, they were happy and the Boy and I had a great time exploring the garden.

It was just about the perfect garden for exploring, new bits to find at every corner, beautiful flowers..

and plants (does echinops count as a flower?) with stone walls as a backdrop..

 

steps up and down and mad urns..

a gate in a wall..

ponds..

pond life..

insect life..

And an optimistically roofless tennis court. 

Quite an old one. Really old in fact. It was built for James V in 1539 and from reading various bits of information there and watching the entertaining video, Real Tennis seems to be an intriguing and somewhat eccentric game, that makes its successor, lawn tennis, look a bit tediously symmetrical and rule-driven. Bounce it off the gallery roof? Why not? 

Miss M had abandoned chess by this time and joined us in the garden. She was quite taken with the tennis court.  Here she is playing imaginary real tennis against an imaginary opponent (Boy wouldn't cooperate).

Extra points for getting the ball out of the holes (lunes) in the wall. That bit's true. Even more points if you knock out a passing peasant at the same time. That bit's not true. Probably. Oh, and in Real Tennis the net is meant to be saggy - I approve of that very much!

Back to the garden, with fragrant roses and space to run (and run and run) around.

So you see why we spent so long there.

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!

Making Monday

Yes, I know it's Tuesday - it's the school holidays, days are fluid (or to put it another way, I didn't have the time/energy to post last night. The first week of the holidays is always a bit intense*).

So here's yesterday's making:

Guessed?

Miss Mouse quite likes making things but even so I was quite surprised at how she took to this. I had to untangle it for her a couple of times but she did very well. She loved choosing the colours (purple, orange, green, blue, cream and brown - she works on the 'more is more' principle) and was very pleased with the result.

Mine was the one that looks like poached egg. Love that yellow..

I can't remember the last time I made a pompom like this but it must be a couple of decades ago at least. It's very relaxing - I even sat through a couple of episodes of Fireman Sam without muttering about the inordinate number of crises they seem to have in Pontypandy.

I do have a plastic pompom maker gadget but it's absolute rubbish (it doesn't work) compared with the classic two wonky rings of cardboard. Yes, cereal box - well it's traditional! I associate making pompoms with being in Primary Five - my teacher had a big bag of leftover wool and we always seemed to have pompoms on the go, filling in any odd times. Finished maths exercise and there's only five minutes 'til the bell goes? Pompom!  My brother had the same teacher when he was in P5 and the big bag of wool was still on the go then - he made loads of pompoms.

I hadn't even thought of teaching the kids to make pompoms until it struck me that the Boy is going into P5 after the holidays and the association was made. Not that he paid much attention, but there you go.




 * By 'intense' I mean there's a lot of bickering, and bedtime can't come soon enough.