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!

Train trip

The kids and I headed north for a few days with my parents last week. Just for fun (and because I didn't fancy driving), we took the train - I think it was the first time the kids had been on a longish train journey (i.e. more than an hour) and in fact it ended up taking more than an hour longer than it should have done. There were electrical problems "due to the adverse weather conditions", so I'm assuming thunderstorm, and we were stationary in Pitlochry station for 45 minutes, though it didn't actually feel that long. Then we had to stop a few times further north (such as in the pic above, in which the landscape would normally be a bit of a blur) for the same reason. The kids were fine though, not too moany. And I got a free coffee out of it :-D.

 The next day we spent at the Highland Folk Museum, always a favourite.

The following day it bucketed down. So the Boy, my mum and I went for a walk in the rain and discovered it really was nice weather for ducks:

 Especially as Mum nipped back to the house and got bread for them. That made us popular.

It was also nice weather for teeny tiny toads, about as big as my little finger nail. I can't quite believe this picture came out so well! That's a dead leaf it's half under, the stones are just the gravel of the footpath. You might have to click to embiggen, it's obviously a toad to me but the more I look at it the more I wonder if anyone else will see it. *paranoia*

And the last day was glorious! Our train wasn't until mid-afternoon so we spent most of the morning in the garden, before heading off south again. We even had the paddling pool out.

Fantastic wee holiday and it was surprisingly easy to travel with the kids. Though I made sure they carried their fair share of luggage, poor little beasts of burden that they were.

Saw this retweeted this evening: “@oceaneyes Now that we have 12 Doctors I'm going to use them to tell the time, it is currently half past Sylvester McCoy.” Well, it's 12 minutes past Peter Capaldi, so I'm off to bed!

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!

The ceiling saga

 Last month we had a leak in the teeniest little pipe under the floor in the bathroom, right over the kitchen inconveniently enough. It turns out it was the most awkward pesky place to get to and half the kitchen ceiling had to come down to get at it. The actual leak was quickly fixed but the kitchen did not look good. Also we found out that it used to be a not particularly nice shade of green - and I love green, so that's saying something.

But a month later and the ceiling is back where it should be, the cabinets that had to be taken down are back up, I've repainted the kitchen, got a new clock as the old one was a bit rubbish and running slow, and the small cat has found a new place to perch.

All the fun and games coincided with the last few weeks of term and we had workmen in plastering and putting the ceiling back up on the first Friday and Monday of the summer holidays. It's all been just a little stressful. So I treated myself to some colourful sock wool that I have been pining over for a while. It's Trailing Clouds' Primary/Secondary (as in primary and secondary colours) and it is self-striping loveliness in a skein. 

I have other things to finish before I cast on but I'm so looking forward to having bright stripey feet in the winter!

But enough of the w-word, it has been warm and sunny here and I've been chasing bees around the garden, trying to get a photo.

Here's one headbutting a lupin. Whee! *thump*

I think this is a carder bumblebee, very ginger thorax. They move surprisingly quickly, I always think, and I have umpteen fuzzy pictures of a ginger blur and as many closeups of a bit of flower that the bee has just left. Exit bee, stage right.

The dyer's chamomile is just starting to flower now and the garden looks very happy in the sunshine.

name that sheep (warning contains a big creepy-crawly pic)

This is wool I bought at the Highland Folk Museum when we were up visiting mum and dad - I love that it's wool with provenance :-D. It was spun on site by my dad's ex-colleague Marion, so though I don't actually know the sheep's name (or, more likely, number), it's damn close!

I'll probably make mittens, fingerless or otherwise (actually, aren't all mittens technically fingerless?), with it. But not now - it's too warm and I have too many other things to finish. I've nearly, so nearly, finished my bright stripey thing. It took me ages to find the final colour, that being the very small amount left from my orange circle socks. Foolish me for wanting needing to make the stripes symmetrical, but I can't help it, it needed to be symmetrical. Really. I should probably point out that Flowermouse's various stripey things, from which I got the idea of doing a stripey thing, aren't symmetrical and I think they look great, but mine needed to be symmetrical this time. I'd like to do another now that's more random though, maybe with a self-striping yarn or just using up random bits of stash.

I've not been blogging much and part of that is that Miss M has been doing Adventure Ted* for the past few weeks and that's made me a bit diarised out. She writes pretty well once she gets going, but needs some nudging to get going! 

It's been great fun and has probably got us out doing more fun things, such as our trip to Edinburgh Zoo on Sunday. I just can't quite believe that it's three years since we did this with the Boy.

At the zoo:

  - the definitive long-leggety beastie crawling up my arm. I think the zoo bloke said this was a spiny devil/thorny devil/something like that. It's a kind of stick insect anyway.  Miss M also held it and wasn't too keen but I quite liked it. We also saw cute cuddly things too.

School finishes for the summer next Wednesday so we're into the final frenzy. Apparently the Boy is getting an attendance prize at assembly on Friday - yes, a prize just for turning up :-D. My Beloved and my brother both said 'Does that mean he doesn't need to bother going in next week?' Can you tell they work in IT?


* To summarise - school sends child home with a teddy bear, child takes teddy on 'adventures' which needn't be very exciting (one of ours was a trip to the dentist, dentist was very sporting about this), and writes about what they've been doing. Photos may be added or pictures drawn. Teddy goes back to school at the end, child may or may not be distraught.

toastie weather

 My husband has just walked in with this:

This is what happens when you work just along the road from a Lidl - random purchases occur. Actually as we have no toastie-maker currently and Miss M is quite partial to them, it is a good thing (quite apart from it having a 'Singe-o-tron image burner'!).

But it's not really toastie weather.  It is warm. Really warm. I mean, for here. I look back on when I lived in New Zealand in my teens and wonder how we coped with temperatures of 20+ degrees all summer. A couple of days of 19.5 degrees and Scotland melts, men who should not expose their pasty beer bellies rip off their shirts in joyous anticipation of 'getting a good colour', red shoulders reveal white bra strap marks, and schoolchildren don't bother changing back from their PE kit after PE. And people mutter 'if that was summer we've had it'.

 Meanwhile in my garden the first poppy is unfurling,

 and the sun is showing up snail trails on the patio. Snails do meander a bit don't they? When the sun was at the right angle I could see metres of trail, drifting around apparently aimlessly but presumably with some sort of snail method in its madness.

 I know as a gardener of sorts I'm supposed to hate snails, but I just don't. I find them entertaining and endearing. The only thing I hate in the garden is dandelions, and that's only because the garden is so small and could easily get swamped in dandelions.

 There were several snails in the garden a few weeks ago and I painted spots on their shells to identify them, but either the paint has come off or this (or perhaps these - I'm not sure it's the same snail in these pictures) is not one of 'my' snails. I'm trying not to give it a name.

Whee!

There's a distinct lack of knitting or making of any kind in this blog at the moment. Partly it's summer term busy-ness and partly warm-weather laziness. But it's also that I had a weirdly swollen thumb over the weekend and at one point was wondering whether I'd somehow broken it without noticing - yeah, I know, how? But really it was hugely swollen, wouldn't bend and was extremely painful. And then suddenly it deflated, started bending and the pain eased though it's still a bit tender on the joint. So I've been giving it a rest and haven't been knitting this week at all, which has seemed a bit weird.

Miss M is home from her dance class so we're off to make toasties!

Who stole May?

In fact, who stole the first half of this year? It's all going so quickly, I can see the school holidays looming on the horizon,  and I need it to slow down! (Can you guess who's not good on rollercoasters?)

So, June. And the sun is shining! The daffodils and tulips are still out because it was a late spring, but the summery things, like calendula, are starting to appear too.  It's all looking rather pretty.

 Calendula

 Hot cat

 Moomin mug - birthday present from my brother :-).

 Tulip 

Those pictures are mostly from last Thursday but it's been intermittently good weather since then (overcast some days) and today was pretty much like the pictures.

And what did I do in May apart from coughing* and not blogging much? Well one thing I did was go to my friend Chrissie's hen do. As hen dos go it was all very tasteful. Mostly anyway. We met up in the afternoon for a beading class at The Bead Company in Glasgow, spent a ridiculous amount of time cooing over choosing pretty beads, then made a necklace and a bracelet each. Here's mine:

Very simple really, but I love them and have worn them a lot especially the necklace. There was of course a disaster during the making of the bracelet, which led to me scrabbling about on the floor collecting my beads back up, but I expected that.

We all went out for a (delicious) Thai meal later and most of us were wearing the jewellery we made that afternoon. It was a lovely way to spend a day and we're hoping to go beading in a group again sometime after Chrissie's back from her honeymoon. We'll be a bead gang. Lean, mean, and distracted by pretty things.

Anyway, I suppose I'd better go and feed my kids. Or let them scavenge or something..

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* I got fed up with feeling rough and went to the doctor last week and I have a shiny new techno-inhaler now. I was always rubbish at timing the pushing of the inhaler with breathing in, but this one is triggered by breathing in so I don't have to do anything at all. Well, breathe in obviously.  On that subject I was at the dentist today for my check-up (all good!) and the hygienist says that you should always have a drink of water or wash your mouth out after using an inhaler because there's quite a lot of residue from the puff that sticks in your mouth and can cause plaque build-up, so there you go - I'm spreading the word :-).