Project 365+1: Days 176 - 182

I've just about gotten the hang of using the new app I downloaded for my phone to make blogging on the go (or without a phoneline at home) a little easier. Unfortunately my mastery of this new medium coincided with a fantastically busy week, so I eventually ran out of time for blogging. Now that I've gotten this weekend out the way, I'm hoping things will ease up a little and I'll be able to get back into a routine with it again.

This week I've been trying to go back to taking photos with my fancy camera (something which would be easier if I actually remembered to take it with me when I leave the house) but for the sake of blogging, I've been making a back-up photo on my phone, so I can stick it into a future post.

Day 176: Bilbo's Last Song

I took this one on my phone first with the anticipation of a blog post about my past obsessions/hobbies. It's actually a post version of Bilbo's Last Song by Tolkien and illustrated by one of his favourite illustrators (of his works), Pauline Baynes. I inherited this from my Grampy and it's been shut away safely in one cupboard or another for the last (almost) ten years. I've got plans to get it framed at some point, then it'll hang at the bottom of our staircase. In the meantime it'll stay safe and rolled up in the spare bedroom.

Day 177: Trouble

Tara looks guilty about something in this photo. I'm not sure what exactly, possibly the amount of fur she's managed to deposit on our creamy carpet (and my in-laws' lighter creamy carpet) in the last week. She's moved on up to full-scale summer fur shedding, to the point where you can vacuum and within five minutes there are little clumps of hair all over the place. If I thought it would help, I'd just save time and vacuum the dog instead.

Thankfully my in-laws have found a comb which seems to have helped slow her down a bit, and we live in Scotland, so summer doesn't exactly last long anyway. At least we can see where we've missed a bit vacuuming right now.

Day 178: Menu

We don't exactly plan out our meals a month in advance, but before we go shopping we plan what sorts of meals we'd like to have for the next few weeks. After insuring Tara through Tesco Pet Insurance they sent us £30 worth of gift vouchers (which have stocked her up on food well) and also meant we could pick up some new DVDs to add to our collection as well.

Unfortunately, one of the only things we forgot to include in our list of meals to have in the coming weeks is the steak and kidney pie which has been sitting in our cupboard for months. I'm not a fan of them, so somehow it's been conveniently missed off each time we've made our list.

Day 179: Dem Bones

This has been my main reason for not posting more this week. Yesterday was both the Armed Forces Day and my work's summer party; I was manning the Red Cross tent and so we needed to provide a few activities for the kids. My contribution to the fun was to spend the previous week cutting out felt organs for an old 'flannelgraph' which we found in the cupboard there. I then decided to use a skeleton diagram posted to make cardboard skeleton 'jigsaws'.

They turned out really well, though rib cages are very difficult to trace (do we really need so many ribs?) and they've been put into storage to save me a little time on them next year.

Day 180: A Little Bit Of Love

As I mentioned, we had to go shopping this week. So Mr. Click showed up at my work afterwards with flowers and chocolates. Thorntons chocolates. Always a nice surprise. I'm not very good with flowers and their names and things, but these ones smell gorgeous and are a lovely shade. We've got this brilliant vase my in-laws gave us when we moved in and every other month it sits on the windowsill just being pretty, then the other month, I get a pleasant surprise and it sits on the windowsill looking like this.

Also, the Thorntons chocolates are lovely!

Day 181: Skinny

And here is the end result of all my hard work; Skinny Skeleton. He's actually a good couple of feel long. I had to lay him out on the bed to get all of him in the picture. I made another one as well between Friday night and Saturday morning (cutting it a little bit fine, I know). It added a little bit of confusion on the day as people tried to work out which bones they needed to complete their skeleton as there were twice as many of everything.

I'm quite pleased with how well it turned out, but it'll be nice to have my evenings back, rather than spending them hunched over a little table, trying to trace the correct number of ribs onto a picture of a ribcage.

Day 182: Feeling Chilly?

Now that I've finished cutting out bones and body parts I've been able to move on to more reading material. Hopefully this also means that during this week I'll be able to get caught up with my book reviews (I did so well at getting caught up with them and now I've fallen behind again). I've only got a few more Review Copies of ebooks to read and then it's onto The Lord of the Rings. It seems to have taken ages to get around to reading the next Terry Pratchett book since Thud! so I'm really enjoying Wintersmith. I've missed the Disc.

I was very good yesterday; the stall opposite ours at the Armed Forces Day had a set of five of the Game of Thrones books. I was very tempted to buy them. But I controlled myself (even though at the end of the day when we were packing up, they were still there!) because those books are very thick and they will be far more practical in ebook format. Plus, I've got so much reading material, I really shouldn't buy myself any more right now!

Anyway, off to eat some yummy homemade chicken soup, hope everyone's having a good week.