Silent Sunday: Bells

Post-Hospital Bargains

Last week I blogged about my hospital appointment for my baseline scan. We followed up the appointment with a little trip around the shops in Glasgow.

When we were there for my Prostap injection I got a new pencil case and some unicorn stickers in Paperchase where I signed up for a reward card with them. One of the major selling points was the £5 off voucher I was promised for my birthday, which was just over a week later and would be valid for two weeks, perfect timing for the next hospital appointment.

We took advantage of the hospital appointment to make use of the voucher. When I'd been picking up the pencil case and stickers I'd been playing 'spot the unicorn'. Unicorns are in fashion at the moment so I found a huge number of them, one of which was a book called 'Keep Calm and Colour Unicorns'. I'd wanted to pick it up then, but couldn't really justify adding to my already heaving collection of colouring books.

Well, with a voucher it was basically a free book, so I was happy to treat myself.

We had a bit of time to kill before we could get lunch so we headed into The Works where they were having a Spring Clearance sale. I spotted the unicorn mug at once and kind of fell in love with it. I love the idea of having something to boost my spirits with my morning tea of bedtime hot chocolate. In the end, after trying to talk myself out of it, Mr Click treated me.

Which meant that I was free to splurge on two more knitting books!

The Knits for Kitties book is actually one which I saw in Ayr and really wanted to get but didn't. It's got some fabulous little toys and animals in it. The other, Cute Knitted Toys, has a basic pattern which is attempted in each pattern to make simplistic animal patterns. Another two for the collection and they only cost £4 for the two!

Perhaps the best bargain of the day was one which I didn't even take a photo of.

I left Mr Click in one shop and took myself into Rymans to look at all the lovely stationery stuff. My oldest colouring pencils are getting a bit past it now so I was on the hunt for some new ones. They had some good offers in there, but none seemed quite as good as the Millie Marotta colouring book, Curious Creatures, which came with a pack of 36 Maped colouring pencils. It was originally £14.99 but had been marked down to £7.49.

Mr Click offered to treat me since it was a really reasonable price for the pencils even without the colouring book. So imagine how pleased we were when the till rang it up at £2! I almost wish I'd picked up another set!

The Lost Library Card

I recently joined a book club because the one thing I need more of is excuses to read books. I've been involved in book clubs before, mostly online and I always enjoy finding new authors and books that way; it was how I came to fall in love with To Kill A Mockingbird and Neil Gaiman.

Once the first book was selected I planned to buy my own copy for a little while but I'm trying to get fewer books at the moment since I don't really have space for the ones I've already got. Then it was time to consider the ebook version but by that time I'd alighted on a better idea.

Check it out of the library!

It's been quite a while since I'd been there, which I've always felt kind of guilty about since I used to be in and out of the place. So many places are losing their libraries and I'd hate for something to happen to ours, all the more reason to actually use it!

Armed with a plan, I went onto the library catalogue website and ran a little search. Sure enough they had the book, but it was out on loan until next week. No fear, I thought, I'll just reserve it for myself afterwards.

Now, our library system uses your library card as your login. I pulled out my purse to retrieve the card, but it wasn't there. Other places it wasn't included the bottom of my bag, the top of my bookcase and the cupboards beside my chair.

And that was when it dawned on me. I knew exactly where my library card would be.

You see, the last time I actually planned to go to the library was a good couple of years ago. I decided I would nip to the library on the way home from work, since I was walking by it anyway. Wanting to keep my library card close at hand, I stuck the card between the pages of my book as a bookmark.

Well, one thing lead to another and I didn't go to the library. I finished the book and set it aside, but never actually removed the 'bookmark' from it.

This means that somewhere in one of the boxes of books upstairs, sandwiched between the pages, is my poor old abandoned library card.

Luckily I finished work early this afternoon so was able to stop into the library and I'm not the proud owner of a shiny new book passport:

And I won't be using this one as a bookmark!

Mini Mischief

Thank you for all the birthday messages! I'm still getting caught up on comments after the A to Z Challenge (hopefully I'll have made it as far as my Z post by the end of this month) but I have read all the comments on my birthday post. :-D

Obviously, I had a fantastic day. It was wonderfully relaxed, which was just what I needed. As I mentioned, there was a definite theme to the day; Knitting and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them so I decided to combine the two by knitting some fantastic beasts of my own.

Namely, my Mischief; Dodger, Fezziwig, Jingle and Pocket.

I started off with Mini!Fez because I had the perfect yarn for his fur and I also needed to get the hang of where I would need to change colours for my more complicated rats.

And I finished up with Mini!Pocket:

As Pocket is a Himalayan I had to work out how many rows I would need to do to get the colouring right on his nose and bum. I think I got his nose spot on but may have done a row too many on his backside.

Dodger and Jingle were a little tricky to get their eyes right on since they're black and they pretty much went invisible once they were sewn on. I had great fun sewing up Dodger's black stripe on his back, though I overdid the stuffing a little and he turned out bigger than Fezziwig!

It wasn't until after I'd got them all knitted and their tails sewn on that I realised that I'd basically spend the day knitting little rat-coloured tampons!

Oops!

Currently...

Back to...
... colouring in!

I finished up the picture I'd been working on in Johanna Basford's Secret Garden earlier in the week and went straight on to this one from Lost Ocean. I've been feeling a tad wound up recently, I'm guessing it's the hormones, and struggling to focus on anything too demanding so colouring in seemed like the perfect thing to do.

I'm very much a fan of picking a few colours and then limiting myself to a particular palette in these pictures. I've managed to move away from the 'proper' colours of things (since colouring in a picture with blue and purple trees) so this time I used a random colour generator to give me an idea of two colours. It threw up green and black so that's what I've gone with, mixing it up a little with black plants and green sealife. I'm planning on adding some pink to the mix soon as well.

Reading...
... Andrew Lang's The Yellow Fairy Book.

It seemed like a nice easy choice back at the beginning of the month but oh boy! Here we are a week later and I'm still reading it.

Part of the problem is, I'm sure, the fact that my meds are making me feel wiped out (and the aforementioned lack of concentration) plus work is insanely busy at the moment. And I've been spending my time colouring in rather than reading, and a hundred and one other excuses. It's just taking forever.

And I am enjoying it. Some of the stories are a little bit repetitive, but on the whole it's good fun. But right now I'm still 20% from the end and it's probably going to take me until at least Sunday to get there.

Preparing...
... to start snorting Buserelin.

I've got two more nights where I can turn the light off at 10:30pm and happily roll over to sleep. Friday morning is going to begin with a snort at 7am, followed by one at 12pm, one at 6pm and the final one of the day at 11pm.

These are crucial timings and I am not to miss one at all. I suspect that there probably is a little bit of leeway with these, after all, the drug will build up in your system. But all the same, the nurses and the paperwork drum it into you that it absolutely has to be done at those times. And with all these things, I always think, 'if it didn't work would you wonder what if I'd taken my meds at the right time?' if the answer is yes, you should probably take them when you're told.

On the other hand, this might work out in my favour, since I'll need to do something to keep me awake (I don't trust myself to set an alarm and actually wake up since my latest trick is rolling over, switching off the alarm after its gone off and then having a sleepy Mr Click mumble 'was that the alarm?' to cause me to bolt out of bed). I might get a lot of reading done, sitting up in bed, that's assuming I don't get distracted by something shiny or which I could colour in!

What are your favourite methods to keep yourself awake when you need to stay up?

Books 42 & 43 of 2016: The Painted Bridge by Wendy Wallace & Merry Men by Robert Louis Stevenson

When I visit my Nan in Wales, she always makes a point of making sure I'm well set for reading material and The Painted Bridge by Wendy Wallace was one that she passed on to me when I went down last year.

It is set during the Victorian era and features a woman named Anna who has been sent away by her husband to an institution. At first it seems as though she was sent there with just cause, but gradually Anna's story comes out which makes you wonder if perhaps her husband's motives might have been ever so slightly sinister. Alongside this is the story of a young doctor who is exploring the possibility of using photography to help diagnose the women he treats.

I felt like I had a bit of a slow start to this one. I guess part of that was because in the beginning I wasn't sure what to expect from it and even when I started I didn't know what sort of a story it was going to be. As I progressed through the book and I learned more about Anna and how she came to be where she was, I couldn't help but get hooked and really drawn in.

It was written in such a way that my opinion of Anna changed as I read. At the start of the book I believed that there was something wrong with Anna because she didn't seem to be doing much to prove her sanity, but gradually I came to realise that there was nothing wrong with her and that there were bigger factors at play in the story.

There's also the subplot featuring the family who run the institution she has been sent away to, and the realisation that they're all kind of in need of help themselves. I found their story almost as interesting as Anna's, particularly trying to figure out what Catherine was going through.

At the end of this book is a preview of the next book, however this one follows Louisa and Harriet; Anna's sister and niece. I love it when you get books which share characters, however this one is set many years after the events of Anna's story. I wonder if Anna will crop up in that one.

I followed this up with a collection of Robert Louis Stevenson stories on the Kindle, Merry Men.

I was already familiar with one of the stories in this collection, Olalla, which I have in the Penguin Little Black Classics edition. I think that I enjoyed it a little more for the second reading though.

This collection had a very 'Scottish' feel to it, particularly 'The Merry Men' and 'Thrawn Janet'. 'The Merry Men' was set on a Scottish island so I especially enjoyed the references to island life in that one. The latter was written in Scots dialect; sometimes I think in Scots dialect (even though when I speak there is no hiding my Englishness), so I didn't have any trouble understanding the story. It was pretty creepy.

'The Treasure of Franchard' seemed to go on for a really long time, but I did enjoy the ending. I think I appreciated it more when I finished it than I did when I was reading it because I liked the way that it ended up developing.

I do have to admit that I'm a bit of a Stevenson fan so I doubt that this will be the last book I read by him.

TV Series Review: 24

Towards the end of last year one of my colleagues at work summoned me to his desk as soon as I'd walked through the door. Intrigued I headed over and was definitely not expecting him to ask me whether I'd ever seen the TV series 24. I've been passed a fair few book recommendations from him over the years, but normally this kind of conversation is reserved for asking me to pick up some emails or do a little handlettering, I definitely play to my strengths at work.

Instead, he had the box set of 24 and wanted to know if I wanted to borrow it. I did and that afternoon it was duly deposited on my desk.

We didn't get around to it until the start of this year seeing as we were entrenched in our annual Christmas film session at the time he brought the series to me. We'd originally planned to go on with watching Criminal Minds at the start of the year, until I decided that I really couldn't face it at the time we were doing the IVF treatment. I needed something a little softer which didn't have people being brutally murdered and sadistic serial killers at every turn.

It turns out that 24 fit that bill quite well. This is kind of funny considering there are nuclear bombs and shoot outs and poisonous gases and all sorts of other terrible things going on in every episode but perhaps because the original series started way back over a decade ago before these things became so commonplace in out TV viewing, it didn't feel as intense somehow.

24 is basically a cross between Die Hard and Spooks. Each series is told in real-time, following Jack Bauer, a CTU (Counter Terrorism Unit) Agent as well as his friends, family and coworkers. Every episode follows the events that take place within that hour and I have to admit, it's a nice gimmick.

When we first began watching the very first series I was a little worried. As with any series with an ensemble cast, it can be a little tricky to keep track of who everyone is and what they're doing. And it seemed like there was a lot happening right from the very first second of this series. Once I got into the swing of things though, I have to admit that I quite enjoyed it.

Mr Click and I had a bit of a bad habit of commenting on everything that was going on, mainly because of how there was never just one bad thing happening. All of the bad things, things that can go wrong, and inconvenient moments all happen at the worst possible moment. Sometimes you go kind of get the sense that they were dragging the storylines out just to make sure it stretched out to the full twenty-four episodes for the series. The tension of the last four of five episodes of each series really bugged Mr Click no end, it was kind of funny watching him almost reach breaking point with every series.

Obviously the hero of the series was Jack Bauer, though at times he doesn't really come across as the most likable of guys. So many of the issues he (and everyone else) encounters in the series could be avoided if occasionally he just told them what he was doing and why. Of course, he couldn't do that because there were enemies on every side who might sell him out or take him down.

My favourite character is probably Chloe O'Brian, mainly because she is the person I could relate to most of all. She doesn't get on with most people, she just wants to get on with her job and she finds it very frustrating when other people want to do things in an impractical or inefficient way. A lot of the comments that she makes about things are the sorts of things I would be thinking myself were I in her shoes, but just wouldn't actually say out loud, or at least while there were people around in earshot. She probably undergoes the most growth as a character over the course of the series so it seemed like she may have actually learned some things from her experiences at CTU and with Jack.

Mr Click's favourite series was the very last one, whereas I liked the third one. We also both quite enjoyed the prequel to series 7, Redemption, which was included in the box set.

On the whole, I quite enjoyed the series and I'm glad that I've seen it. There were lots of little things that bugged me while I watched it, the not least the fact that for all its security and protocols, it was easier to get into CTU than the call centre where I work. Each series had a mole who was feeding information to the bad guys; you think they'd improve their screening procedures.

Also, in the 24-verse, being the President is a lonely job since you're pretty much guaranteed to lose all your family members once you get the role, probably because they're needing to go to jail for murdering people!

It's a programme I could see myself getting on DVD some time and watching again, though Mr Click isn't too sure himself. Watching it a second time would probably lessen some of that tension, but I'm sure it would make those earlier episodes a little easier to follow as you'd already have a handle on who everyone was.