Happy New Year!

Just a quick post to say:

Happy New Year!

Hope that everyone is recovering from their celebrations last night and you're not suffering too much.

 

Here's to a good year, lots of new and happy memories, trying more new things and meeting lots of new people.

 

And hopefully no five day power cuts this year!

 



Project 365+1 Days 15 - 21

I so very nearly did a 365+1 update earlier this week. I had an internet connection and everything, so I might have actually managed to make a proper blog post (rather than a quick potted summary of my week). But I just couldn't summon up the energy (I was dying with a cold at the time).

Instead, here's an overview of my week.

On Saturday night I was supposed to go out for a friend's surprise birthday party. Dying with the cold as I was, I never actually managed get changed out of my pyjamas during the day, let alone into something nice. As the jewellery part of my outfit I had planned to wear one of my Christmas presents from Mr. Click, a beautiful locket that he popped into my Christmas stocking for me.

Instead I wore it to pretty up my outfit on Sunday instead, and took a photo that evening to commemorate wearing it for the first time.

Day 15: With All My Heart

Monday was a work day, on the early shift, which is actually one of my favourites. I was snotty and sweaty all day, so it was nice to get home early, shower and make myself feel a bit more human. We had an early night and snuggled up to watch stuff in bed on the laptop, with a nice big mug of hot chocolate.

Day 17: Hot Hot Hot Chocolate

I've had my big hot chocolate mug for years (for Christmas I got a much smaller, slightly more practical hot chocolate mug with Disney Princesses on it, hehe). It's only since taking this photo that I've realised that my biscuits were slightly out of date, oh well, perhaps I've just found the cure for the common cold - by the next day I was feeling much better.

On Tuesday I won a competition at work, earning me a £5 gift voucher. After checking it out online I realised that pretty much all of the shops I was planning on going into during that Saturday's shopping trip would accept it. Definitely a much better prize than chocolates or wine (although if my employers want to give me bottles of wine, or chocolates, or hampers, I'll be more than willing to accept them)!

Day 17: A Prize-Winning Bookmark

The book I was reading at the time was Longitude by Dava Sobel. It was quite interesting, about John Harrison's invention of a clock to measure longitude at sea. Unfortunately, it came about after the author wrote an article and someone suggested that she write a book on the subject, it was interesting and well-written, but had that 'article-feeling' to it. It wouldn't have felt out of place in a national newspaper with some big bold pictures around it.

Wednesday we had friends round for a bit of a catch-up (this was a night we'd been planning since around Christmas, but Christmas, New Year, a power cut and bad weather all got in the way). We had a great time. Dug out nibbles and wine from the Hamper I won before Christmas and ate, drank and chatted.

Day 18: Bottom's Up!

My in-laws gave me a big bottle of Peach Schnapps for Christmas, which I started work on during the blackout (it just drove me to drink I guess). I had two rather large glasses during the night which made taking photos a bit tricky when I got back that night. Of course, the almost empty bottle seemed like a logical thing to take a picture of.

Day 19: Practice Makes Perfect

For Day 19 I took a picture of my husband practicing (the cornet I took my first photo of the year of). I had kind of planned out the way I wanted it to look, though it didn't really turn out the way I'd hoped because the room we were working in was a bit too small for me to get the angle I wanted. The lighting wasn't great either and try as I might, there was no way I could get the focus to fall exactly where I wanted it.

Also I was balancing on a bed, which didn't really help with the focusing issues.

Meanwhile, I've still been working on my Day Zero Project (I've actually managed to tick a few things off this week - getting an address book for example and winning a competition, woo hoo!) and this has included continuing to work on the jigsaw puzzle, which is becoming quite the challenge.

Mainly because it's basically a TARDIS in disguise. It's totally illogical but somehow, the inside is wider than the outside. The outside doesn't all join up properly, so we started work on the middle, which now looks something like this:

Day 20: Even More Puzzling

As you can see, it's joined up in one continuous picture, it's even joined to the bottom edge in several places all the way along. What you can't see is that just to the right it continues right past the right side edge piece and there's no way of adding to any of the bottom edge in the middle. It's truly bizarre. All we can do is keep working at it and hope that it comes together in the end... or not, as the case may be.

And yesterday?

Well yesterday we woke up to what sounded like gale force winds and briefly debated going back to bed, rather than attempting to make it to Mr. Click's tutorial. But we decided that the least we could do was try and at least that way we could go back to our nice warm bed without feeling too guilty.

Once down on the seafront, it wasn't particularly windy and the boats ran. And it wasn't even very rocky, so we relaxed and decided that if for whatever reason we couldn't get back, we'd book into a hotel room and see a film (so I was kind of disappointed when we managed to get home without any problems).

In Glasgow we went to HMV to spent my gift voucher on a Disney blu-ray. Though they had pretty much no choice - it was A Bug's Life or one we already had. So we looked around and found a two for £15 offer on a bunch of other blu-rays. £10 and my voucher got a The Sound of Music and Moulin Rouge. I've been wanting to rewatch Moulin Rouge for ages, so yay!

While Mr. Click was in his tutorial I treated myself to some nice new vest tops for work and then spent far too long in Waterstones looking for a book for myself. We went back when Mr. Click was done and bought a book for him and eventually I settled on a little set of craft books for myself as well.

Of course, I planned on taking a photo of all the goodies we picked up yesterday. But the weather had other plans. We got home, had tea, got the girls out and relaxed. Spooks had just finished and we were starting to get ready for bed when the power went out. That proved fun - trying to get four wiggly girl rats back into the cage using nothing but a mobile phone and a torch with no battery.

In the end I settled for a photo of the bookshelf with the little pretend candle we were using to illuminate the room:

Day 21: Blackout Bookshelf

The reason I took the photo of that particular shelf is because I'm currently reading the second Kathy Reichs book in the series there (hence the gap). The flash showing that we kind of need to dust a bit is just an added bonus, hehe.

So that's me all caught up once again. And I'm now approximately 4% of the way through Project 365+1. Yay. Still working on my Day Zero Project, though the thing that's causing some problems at the moment is the knitting challenge I gave myself.

I decided to change "Knit something each month" to "Complete each project I start" purely because I'm being very tempted by a blanket pattern at the moment and it's unlikely that I'll finish the scarf I started by the end of January.

I did actually mean to bring out my scarf with me to work on today but we then woke up to no power again (it did come back on last night after an hour or so) so we just dragged ourselves out of bed and left the house earlier than planned. Thankfully I live in Scotland, so wearing a scarf in the summer (which is probably when I will finish it) won't make me look too out of place, hehe.

Blackout! & Project 365+1 Days 3 - 7

I've been unable to update my blog for pretty much all of this week due to a lack of power. It all started on the morning of the third, at about 7:15am when, whilst lying snuggled in bed enjoying the last fifteen minutes of reading time, the lights unexpectedly went off.

We'd been listening to the wind blowing outside for the hour before that and had been expecting a power cut. We weren't particularly alarmed, just slightly annoyed that neither of us had thought to charge our phones while we had a chance. There was a bit of debate about who would get to use the big torch and who would make do with the blinky light on our phones to get up/get dressed/go to the bathroom but we got on with our morning routine as normal.

Day 3: Power Cut

Outside the wind was wild so we left for work early expecting trouble on the roads. It didn't take us long to find it; a massive tree down across one of the roads on the Estate where we live. Through the woods we could see blue flashing lights and assumed that firefighters were trying to get through to clear that road out. We carried on and almost made it onto the main road when we found the top of a tree covering the road.

After doing a many-point-turn, we headed out the other end of the Estate, onto the main road and turned in the direction of town. We'd gone just a few dozen metres when we came to a halt: another tree blocking the way. Lather, rinse and repeat in the other direction. So we headed home, resigned to the fact that we would be stuck at home for the rest of the day.

We played a board game and I worked on my OU course work for a while before we decided to make another go of it. Several trees were still down but they'd cleared the way through the one blocking the road, quite literally 'through', by just the chopping out and hauling off the road of the bit in the way.

Luckily my work is powered by a generator, so I had heating, lighting and internet access for the day, but back home we were in darkness. And it hadn't returned by the following morning.

Wednesday was basically a repeat of Tuesday. We stopped with my in-laws who have a gas heater in their living room and a gas hob for warming water. Except that we had to make a dash home to collect clothes and our rats. When we'd left the day before we had been expecting the power to be back by that evening, so we'd packed them up snuggly with plenty of food and bedding, just in case we didn't make it back. By Wednesday it was clear that we needed to go and collect them.

We made it back onto the Estate without any problems and then found another tree across the road. The wind had started to get up again and we were worried about the road being blocked in the other direction too so we decided to park up and walk back to the house, retrieve the girls and other necessities and then walk back to the car. Easily the least sensible thing we could have done considering the fact that it involved walking along a half-mile tree-lined avenue in high winds that were bringing trees down left, right and centre!

It was scary as hell, but within half and hour we were back in the car with rats, clean clothes, phone chargers (ever hopeful the power would return), OU books and notes and my laptop (which had no charge left on the battery).

Of course, by the second night of the power cut the batteries in the torches were starting to run low and we were beginning to get low on candles:

Day 4: Candle Light

Thursday brought a new development; no power or phone lines! Apparently the back up generator had failed there and left us even more cut off. By this point the BBC had got wind of the story as well and made a nice little report about how we were still totally cut off without power and the council arranged for catering vans to come over and supply free food to anyone without power.

Ironically, it was just at this point that the power did come back on, for at least some of the island. Of course our house wasn't one of the ones lucky enough to get electricity, so it was another night away from home for us. I did manage to get my laptop plugged in and charged and word sent to my tutor explaining the problems we were having. I even managed to get my assignment printed off and it was a relief not to have to try working by candle light.

Day 5: Catching Up

By Friday, as far as I'm aware, we were still on generator power, but only a few houses we still without. Ours being one of them. It did come and go, Mr. Click went home during the day to take down the Christmas tree and do some housework and there was power, but by the time we'd got home that evening, it was off again. We didn't even unpack the car, just got back in and headed straight out again.

Day 6: Roots

At least I was able to sit and read without straining my eyes - I'm seriously in need of another eye test and I don't think the candlelight reading has particularly helped matters. Roots has been my first book of the year and I'm still ploughing through it, I read it many years ago but it's taking me much longer this time. I think partly because I've read The Book of Negroes since then as well and I'm comparing it that as I go along, but also because I've learnt more about the time period since then as well. That and it's quite heavy going in places so I'm finding it harder to devour it the way I might do with a fluffy or lighter novel.

This copy actually belonged to my Grampy and it's been very well read over the years. I remember seeing it on his bookshelves and it's nice to see it on mine now. The pages still smell like him as well.

For a portion of Saturday our house was still without power and there was some debate about whether or not we would make it home that day. Luckily it came back and we were able to spend our first night in our own bed since the power cut began.

Mr. Click had already been home and taken the decorations down, which I was a little disappointed about because I'd hoped to take photos of them going down (just as we'd taken photos of putting them up). But he left them all out for me so I could arrange them into a nice Project 365+1 photo before they went back into the cupboard for the year.

This was my favourite photo of the lot:

Day 7: Father Christmas

This was the first Christmas ornament we bought together. He's ceramic and wooden, dressed in fancy furs, a proper traditional Father Christmas with a staff. Before we lived together he visited our homes on alternate Christmases. He's standing next to the Christmas tree box which is overflowing with ornaments (which fitted in there fine when we took them out but just don't seem to fit back in there now). I decided to fiddle around with this one and although I took it in colour, I think it looks quite nice in black and white. Christmas is all about the colours so it seems fitting to have a monochrome picture of the aftermath.