Project 365+1: Days 316 - 322

I've been so well organised this week, not only have I managed a blog post every day, I've got book reviews written for my next five or so books that I've read, and I've been planning posts for December already. I'm a little bit scared about where this sudden burst of inspiration has come from (and I'm not wanting to shout about it too loudly in case I scare it away).

NaNo is still going well as well. I've slowed down the pace a bit now (generally getting somewhere between 700-1000 words per day in) because I just don't need to keep rushing at it. I've got a little over 10,000 left until the end of the month and as I have a tendency to stop when I hit the 50,000 word mark, I've decided that if I pace myself like this, I'll still be writing until the end of the month. The shift I've been on this week hasn't been brilliant for having writing time, plus I've been wanting to get caught up on my OU stuff. Now I'm back on track, and I'm on a better shift, I think I might get a few more words on the page each day.

Day 316: Lots of Laundry

We've got this lovely rug/throw that we keep on our bed which helps to keep us nice and toasty. Unfortunately, Tara's taken to sleeping on our bed, so that rug needed to be washed. Luckily, Mr Click's parents let us have another couple of throws to replace it while it was at the laudrette. Unfortunately, those throws are both cream and so get dirty even quicker than the lion rug does. This is the laundry basket when it returned from having its contents cleaned (the pile of socks on top was from our own washing machine, I just needed to dump them somewhere well out of the sock monster's reach).

The lion rug is all lovely and soft and fleecy again now and I can't wait to get it back on the bed. Except I kind of can wait, because now we've got the heating on, and getting into bed in a warm room with a big heavy throw over me will just be unbearable. But it'll be lovely when the weather starts getting warmer again and we start turning the heating off.

Day 317: Frog

This week we mourned the sad loss of Bug. Bug has been Tara's favourite toy ever since we got her. She chewed his antenae off (and ate one of them!) and started ripping off his wings and eating his legs, so I had to amputate all of them that she left, but poor old Bug hasn't stopped smiling. He even survived his dip in the washing machine (despite me being convinced that the only thing that was holding him together was dog slobber and dirt).

But then Tara got a little enthusiastic about pulling and chewing him the other day and ripped a big hole in his side and we were forced to conclude that maybe Bug's time with us had passed. So Mr Click found a green fluffy substitute. And we named him Frog.

He's lovely and cuddly and good for whacking and chewing and throwing. Unfortunately for Frog, Tara's got teeth like needles and she's already torn a hole in him as well. So right now Frog is hiding out in the spare bedroom until I can attack him with a bit of thread so that Frog and dog can be reunited with each other again. And hopefully she'll be able to go a little bit longer before destroying him completely.

Day 318: It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas

I've been taking part in a reading challenge on HTV, which has various sub-challenges which you can take part in alongside just trying to read as many different books as possible. Each season we've got a challenge to read six books which begin with each letter of the current season, in this case 'Autumn'. The fact that there are two Us in the word Autumn sent me looking for some free/cheap downloads of my Kindle and I ended up finding two books Louisa May Alcott's Under the Lilacs and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey which I probably wouldn't have gone out of my way to read otherwise.

With that in mind I set about looking for some Christmas reads. Normally in the run up to Christmas I read Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol and J.R.R. Tolkien's Letters to Father Christmas. This year I decided that I wanted to add to that and so I did a bit of searching and found twenty-eight free books all with the word Christmas (or something similar) in the title. So now I have enough reading material to last me until somewhere around Valentine's Day!

Day 319: The Veiled Detective

Review coming shortly! (because I'm being awesome and getting all caught up with those reviews). This is a book which I actually got Mr Click last year and I've been wanting to read ever since he finished with it, but I've kept on overlooking it in favourite of other books. Even this time I nearly passed it over in favour of a Colin Dexter book from his shelf instead. I whizzed through it quite quickly once I got into it (which took a little while). Now I'd better get some more of these Further Adventures books for him this Christmas!

Day 320: New Home

This is a picture of two parts. At the top you can see the collection of Christmas films and DVDs that I dug out of the cupboard upstairs to bring down so we can start our traditional Christmas film watching (we've got over thirty, so we need to start a bit before the beginning of December to squeeze them all in). That's not even all of them pictured there because there's a handful out on the bookcase in the front lobby as well (those which I'd already brought down, or that we've already watched).

The bottom half of the picture is the new rat cage which we invested in last week. The girl's cage was home to around ten rats (over the last ten years) and has really reached the end of its useful life. The ladder has been disposed of, the shelves are all worn and chewed and ruined by rat pee, the bars are rusted. It also had this faint odor that no amount of scrubbing and febreezing would get rid of, so the time had come to consign it to the skip and get a new one.

And for £90 we've got exactly what I wanted. It's exactly the same cage as the original, but they've updated it in the intervening years. The bars are now plastic coated (which I imagine the girls will discover soon enough and start removing, but it looks snazzy right now), the plastic feels much sturdier and the base is a few millimetres deeper (not such an issue now we use shredded paper, but definitely a big deal if we're using litter). The tubes that come with it are clear and it doesn't have that old lingering odour of the old cage. Considering the last one was a little over ninety quid and we had to take the car to get it, £90 with free delivery was a good enough deal for me.

Day 321: Settling In

We had great fun setting up the new cage (and Tara had great fun exploring the ma-hoosive box that it came in). The best part of the day yesterday was watching the girls exploring their new surroundings because the old cage was so worn out we were pretty limited in where we could put things inside so we've not changed it around as much as I like. This is Holly checking out the change in scenery. I just wish I could have taken a photo of Carol falling off the hammock because we'd moved it to the other side of the cage from where it usually hangs.

Day 322: Hanging Around

The one job that we didn't get done yesterday was fixing up this, our new coat stand which we bought in Ikea two weeks ago. Until this morning it's been in the box leaning up against the living room wall and generally getting in the way. I love putting things together so Ikea's flat-packed furniture is just my idea of a really good time. It took me all of about fifteen minutes to do (and that's including the time it took to fasten part of it together wrongly and have to take them out again).

It's called 'Portis' and we've already started filling it up with coats and things. Until now we've been hanging everything off of the kitchen door and the single hook we've got in the kitchen (the walls can't take hooks because of the plasterboard). The coats we don't wear so often are all in the spare bedroom so I'll have to take down all the ones we put up this morning to put the lighter ones underneath, but other than that, it's a job well done, at last. ;-D

And that's about it for the Click household this week. I've got a long week coming up, hoping to get a spot of Christmas shopping done as well as a trip to the vet for Tara about a warty thing on her chin. We've got a stack of Christmas films to watch and I've got to start thinking about my next OU assignment too, which means I have to finish reading one of those books first!

It's going to be another busy week!