Calm January

My aim for January was for it to be relatively calm. It hasn't really been calm of course - life tends towards busy after all, but after the frenzy that was December it was nice to calm down a bit.

It was very cold today, by the standards of this neck of the woods - my car said it was -7°C, and it felt it. But it was (mostly) clear and bright and it was my day off so I went for a quick walk, and the colours were lovely. Very soothing. It's a funny thing, but the difference between -1 or -2 and chillier numbers like -6 or -7 seems really palpable. Freezing, is well, freezing, but in a sort of 'hat and gloves will sort it' kind of way, whereas today was definitely 'could be doing with thermals under my clothes, oh my god my thighs have gone numb' kind of weather. In fact I got a bit chilled trying to get one of the cats back in this evening and have been wearing a bobble-hat and scarf ever since...

I read something yesterday about enjoying January and appreciating the calmer colours after the glitter/tinsel/fairy-lights of December, and thought that perhaps I approach January in the wrong way, trying to plough through it. I always try to enjoy what I can but maybe I should try to appreciate its inherent Januaryness in some way. Still, a bit late now - a thought for next year maybe!

Just some rambling

I made my Christmas cake today, for the first time in several years actually. And it's a full-size one because I couldn't find my notes on the ingredients for the slightly smaller cake I made last time, and I really couldn't be bothered doing all the arithmetic again! It's such a faff when you're basing calculations around the number of eggs while simultaneously tweaking the ingredients (omitting mixed peel and glace cherries, that kind of thing). But it's done now and it smells nice. 

I also went for another very quick walk to get a dose of sunlight and fresh air. It was pretty chilly and some of the puddles still had ice around the edge. I like ice patterns, there's so much variety.

Not a very good picture - I thought had a better one than that but it might be on my actual camera rather than my phone. I'm trying to get into the habit of carrying my camera with me regularly again.

Red sticks in the sun (not exactly poetry)

A clear, bright day on December is a wonderful thing. I'm trying to make the most of what daylight there is and get out as much as possible, even if it's only a 20 minute walk. I love low sunlight in winter - all the colours look so rich, especially that red dogwood.

Once again I'm blogging from my phone and finding it quite tricky to be honest - aside from apparently having huge clumsy fingertips, I seem to have a really short attention span and forget what I'm trying to type if I can't see it all at once. I was actually going somewhere with this. Nope, gone. Perhaps I should compose blog posts in haiku form.

Right, I'm boring myself now, I'll leave off boring the world at large and go back to trying to find out about SQL as the Boy has just muttered something about it.

Today's adventure

I'm experimenting with blogging from my 'phone. It's like trying to write a letter while pushing it through the letterbox. That is not today's adventure.

Technically Miss M's adventure rather than mine, but as I have my own concert band past, I rather enjoyed it.  It was the regional heat of the Scottish Concert Band Festival, and their school band got a Gold Plus, which automatically sends them to the final in Perth in the spring (I say spring but I am familiar with Perth in March, it could easily be snowing).  Miss M is very excited. I've got to say, they played beautifully. I'm really impressed with the quality of music at her school! So it was worth getting up at dark&gloomy o'clock, to get her there on time, having had another rubbish night's sleep due to my annoying cough. Still, there are worse ways to spend a morning than listening to live music and chatting to friends.  Ha, sounds like quite a hipster morning!

I had this plan..

.. to get back to regular blogging. I actually have loads of things I could ramble on about. Can I remember them? Not a chance!

I have a cold - nothing major, sore throat, cough, the usual, but I'm feeling rough.  I've spent a fair amount of today in bed - reading, sleeping, or catching up on I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here on my tablet.  The cuddly boy cat has been my companion for most of the day:

I can't remember where I was going with this. He's lovely though, isn't he?

No longer having a child at primary school means I'm no longer on the PTA, and though I miss aspects of it, I've noticed how much time and energy I must have been putting into it because normally by the 1st of December I'd be stressing out big-time and this year I'm not. Not yet anyway.  I'm still busy but in different ways (ways that don't involve epic battles with a photocopier) - early start tomorrow, for example, as Miss M's in the school concert band and they have a thing on tomorrow morning. And the Boychild has his prelims (mock exams) soon so he gets me to help him revise. This is frequently comical, given that the last time I did chemistry was about 1985...

waking up

Sleepy Sheep

Oh dear, it's been a long time. But now it's a Saturday morning, the Boy and I are awake and pottering around (actually he's waiting for Small Cat to move so that he can get to his computer), and I have some peace and a bit of time at my computer. It has been a busy few months one way or another. Miss M finished primary school and has started high school, so now we're all getting used to the new routine - in some ways easier because at least they're both at the same school. The Boy has his National 5's (exams) this year, but seems quite placid about it. He's likes all his subjects so that helps.

Now that I'm blogging of course I can't think of a single thing to say. It's always the way of it. So I'll tell you about the pictures.

The sheep one is from a day last month when we went for a longish walk at the windfarm nearby (Whitelee). We were walking there one day last year and noticed an oddly-shaped hill just beyond the edge of the windfarm, past the end of one of the tracks leading to a turbine. It was unusually flat-topped so I googled it when I got home and found out that the unusual shape of Dunwan Hill is thought to be the remains of a hill-fort,"occupied probably in later prehistory between around 1200 BC and AD 400" (more details on Historic Environment Scotland's page on it). So when we went again last month we decided to climb it - it's not high, and there's a footpath from the edge of the windfarm land but the previous time we'd gone there had been sheep by the gate and we didn't want to disturb them. This time the sheep were further up and pretty much unbothered by us, and even posed nicely for me. I do like a good sheep picture. They were lounging around just outside the lower rampart, enjoying the sunshine.

Dunwan Hill

Roses on the kitchen windowsill

The roses - every now and then I buy myself flowers and put them in a vase on the kitchen windowsill where they catch the sunlight, if there is any. The kitchen is generally quite a bright room if there's even a hint of sunlight. And then I take a photo for looking at in January, just to remind myself that the sun will be back.

Sleepy cat; dignity optional

And finally Small Cat, this morning, looking very relaxed. Lazy weekend lounging, though to be honest the cats do lazy weekend lounging on any day of the week.

So that's all for know. If I get round to blocking my latest knitting project and adding a pompom, I'll blog about that too!

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!