Acquired in Oban

As I mentioned yesterday, on Saturday we went to Oban. It's becoming a bit of a tradition to head North for my birthday and this year there wasn't really any question about where we would spend the day. It was always going to be Oban.

This year we've got the luxury of a local kennel who can take Tara when we're off the island. By checking her in the night before we were able to get away really early on Saturday morning... in fact, what we're talking about doing next time is driving up the night before and stopping over to give us the chance to get out and have a nice meal.

The alarm went off at 5:30am and we were on the ferry by 7:10am. I'd made up three good mix CDs for the trip and it passed really well. We went in an out of rain a few times but on the whole the weather stayed good for us the whole day.

I'd planned the trip like a military operation. Mr Click was under strict instructions to look for clothes while I looked at books in the charity shops. He came up trumps and by the end of the trip I'd got a new jacket, a new hoodie, a new everyday top and a new shirt for work.

I also found four DVDs: Kate and Leopold, Billy Connolly's World Tour of New Zealand, Wimbledon and a Brass Bands ones (the last two are mainly for Mr Click, the latter because he's into brass bands and the former because Kirsten Dunst is pretty much naked in it).

There was a lot of book shopping as well.

The top one of these three is a book which caught my eye because of the name on the cover, Henry Irving. He was born John Henry Brodribb, Brodribb being my paternal grandmother's maiden name and I'm distantly related to him. It's a book about the influence Irving and an actress named Ellen Terry had on the theatre. It looks really interested so I'm excited to read it at some point.

The other two books came from a shop which doesn't normally yield anything exciting. It's full of glass and crockery and ornaments with just a couple of bookshelves of books out the back. Saturday we struck gold though, with two of the four DVDs that we bought and two books for me. One caught my eye because of the reference to knitting (from the blurb on the back it looks a little like a Debbie Macomber book I read a while back), the other for Neil Gaiman, though I'm going to have to stick a Post-It note over the spider on the cover. *shudders*

With my Chapter-by-Chapter reviews in planning I decided to look out for a certain series of books that I've been avoiding for quite a while. The Twilight ones. I didn't have much luck to start out with though, there were copies of most of the books in most of the shops but they were usually wanting between £2 and £3 for them (and I knew I could get Kindle editions for about that which would take up less room on my shelves).

Until we came to the final charity shop of the trip where they sold paperbacks for just 50p each. I picked up Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner for just £2 total (even though the last book is a hardback). Bargain! I then had to powerwalk back to Oxfam where I'd seen Breaking Dawn for £2.99. So I've got the full set for less than £5... I'm actually quite looking forward to subjecting myself to them and recording my responses Chapter-by-Chapter.

Something I don't have a photo of is the pretty wool that I picked up in the wool shop there. I wasn't sure if the shop was even still there, it was great to go in and actually squish the wool. As is my habit at the moment I went for some variegated stuff, this time in lovely greens and blues. I'm thinking of making handwarmers out of them although it's wool which'll probably make me itch so I might have to find a more suitable owner when I'm done.

I do have a photo of Tara's gift that I took home for her:

It's a giant tennis ball. I didn't really have anything immediately to hand to give a sense of scale when I took this photo but that's my bookcase in the background. The blue and red books are The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, there's also The Book Thief there as well so you can get an idea of just how big it is. About football sized, I'd say.

Tara loves it! As soon as she spotted it she leaped on it. I'm not sure how long it's going to last because she's already stuck a tooth through it once but I'd like to get a video of her with it soon; she just looks so happy. Definitely worth the money I spent on it for the entertainment value.

Tara's also getting fed for free this month as Tesco overcharged us on the dog food we bought and they gave us double the difference back. Luckily we noticed before we left and didn't have to plan a return trip to Oban for the refund!

It was a really long and tiring day, but we finished it off with chips from Mr Pia's on the way home. Easily the best chips in Scotland. Can't wait to do it all again... maybe next year. ;-)