Weekly Rundown: Blizzarding!

I'm late with my Weekly Rundown post this week, mainly because I've spent best part of the day uploading almost all of the other posts for the next six days. You'll also be pleased to learn that I've finally gotten around to watching The Desolation of Smaug for my next Hobbit film review set of posts.

So I'm late because I've been organised. Go figure.

I'm also a little bit late because I got distracted reading House fanfiction. Yeah, yeah, I know, it's like I'm a teenager again. What's more than a little ironic is that I stumbled across one that I vaguely remembered and I happily sat here reading it. It wasn't until I got to the end of the second chapter that I realised it was one that I'd written. Oops, hehe. And it wasn't too bad either.

We've almost finished the first series of House now and I'd forgotten how much I love this show. I've seen the first couple of series enough times to vaguely remember what will happen, but not well enough to remember everything, so it's almost like watching a brand new TV series. I can't wait til we get to the later episodes that I've only seen once or not at all.

I'm still reading The Lord of the Rings. I'm not reading a very portable edition and so it's fairly slow going. Especially since my Fitbit has made me very aware of my sleeping patterns. I'm trying to turn the light out earlier to make sure that I'm hitting my sleep targets. Unfortunately that impacts on my reading time. I'm thinking in the next week I'm going to have to have a bit of a push to try and read two chapters a day otherwise it'll be the only book I read this year!

I'm still managing my Middle-earth walking. There's only one day when I've not managed my full 1.2 miles and that was purely because I woke up in an icy winter wonderland on Friday. I was half expecting to need to call into work because the road through the estate was iced over, but we made it off okay.

Yesterday we made up for it by going for an extra long walk, and again in the evening because it had been snowing all afternoon. I love snowy weather, so I dragged a reluctant Mr Click and an excitable Tara-Tup out with me.

There was that monochromatic thing going on out in the world as though someone had turned the saturation way down, and although you can't see it in this photo, there were massive snowflakes falling.

It's almost all gone today, of course, but it was pretty while it lasted.

Weekly Rundown: Weather Bombs, Bobbed Hair, & Hanging With Santa

Uh, yeah, it was the work Christmas night out last night. I'm afraid I can't come up with a more imaginative title for this post. It's not that I was drinking or anything, but it was a late night and apparently my brain is getting too old for these late nights.

This has been a pretty eventful week. Obviously we started out with the 'weather bomb'. When did we start getting those? I don't ever remember anything being called a weather bomb before. I feel like an old lady, in my day we had storms, not weather bombs.

Anyway, we were lucky in that despite being pretty windy and there not being any ferries running properly for two days, we avoided the worst of it. The seas were more than a little bit choppy though.

That's the view outside my in-laws' house last week. Mr Click took the photos on his phone for me so I could see how wavy the water was. Next time I'll have to get him to make a video so you can really appreciate just how much movement there was there.

We had some impressive lightning and thunder too, over those two days. One seemed to come from right outside the window of the bedroom I was sleeping in. Tara was most definitely not impressed with it.

Then yesterday we had a big freeze with lots of ice. This made travelling to town for me to get my hair cut somewhat treacherous. We ended up spending most of our time wandering around down the middle of the road, since none of the paths had been gritted. Normally this sort of behaviour makes me a bit twitchy, but Rothesay seems to have its own set of rules for the road, one of which is that pedestrians will walk pretty much anywhere. None of the drivers seemed too bothered to see us there.

And yes, the haircut is the other big thing that's happened this week. You may remember the previous drastic haircut when I went from this:

To this:

Well, I've been psyching myself up to going even shorter. It's taken me a while, it's about two years since the last big chop. I spent a while googling potential new styles and eventually settled on something short and choppy. My short hair was fairly easy to take care of, but I wanted something even more low maintenance. So I've gone for this:

I have to say I like it. I didn't do anything with it after the hairdresser cut and styled it for me yesterday but this morning I was faced with that difficult task of trying to recreate what the experts did the day before. It's something I've always suffered with, the hairdresser makes it look all nice and neat, then I end up looking like I've been dragged through a hedge backwards.

Not so this time. I'll admit, it's a little bit flat on one side, and a little bit sticky out on the other, but that's just because I couldn't be bothered to get my straighteners out before I left the house. Bit of hairspray to keep my fringe out my eyes and a run through with a comb and it's perfect. I love it!

And I think I looked pretty good for my night out last night. Good food, good company, and Santa, what more does a girl need?

It really is beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

Wordless Wednesday: Wet

First Snowfall

Yesterday at work I got back from my lunch, settled at my desk, started doing what needed to be done, glanced out the window and noticed it was snowing.

This caused a wee bit of excitement (mainly from me) especially when it actually started settling in places. Luckily it didn't snow for very long and didn't stay settled for much longer, but still, it all adds to that Christmassy feeling.



You'll notice I mentioned being at work up there. After the excitement of yesterday I did eventually make it to work. Only two and a half hours late.

We had a little while to wait for the trees blocking the roads where I live to get cleared as well as the main road along the seafront to be reopened after some scaffolding was made dangerous by the high winds (read: blowing bits of it across the road and into people's homes!) but once we got the all clear it was a pretty easy journey.

Lots of big trees uprooted though, two of which took out two big chunks of a wall in virtually the same place as last year when we had the big storm. Luckily there weren't any power cuts and we fared a lot better than some places around the country.

Stormy Weather

A couple of years ago we had an unexpected freak storm that knocked out power to most of the island for three days (and to our remote corner for five).

It seems that storm is back with a vengeance today.

I dreamt I was on a boat last night because of the strong winds buffeting the house. Our house has two foot thick stone walls and I swear it was shaking!

Taking Tara for her morning trip to the garden I was nearly blown off my feet. It's wild out there!

About to brave the journey to work. Good luck to anyone travelling in increment weather today.

Happy-Making?

I know that there’s a blog hop which gets people to post some of the things that have been making them happy during that week. I’ve never joined in on it, but I like the idea of it, so here are some of the things that have made me happy this week:

• Finally getting to watch the first series of Game of Thrones on blu ray
• Taking part in a sweepstake at work for the Grand National, didn’t win anything but it was good fun
• Lovely weather so I’ve actually been able to get washing out on the line so it smells all fresh when it comes in
• Reading lots of interesting blogs as part of the A to Z Challenge as well as finding lots of nice comments on my blog
• Exciting things coming up in the rest of the week including a meal out with people from work and a trip to the cinema

What about you? What have been your happy-making things this week?

Better late than never...

Just came up for my shower (possibly the last one in a while since we've got a plumber in about a leak tomorrow and I'm not sure where it's coming from), looked up at the window and saw this:




Actual snow!

While the rest of the country has been struggling through inches of the stuff my little Scottish island has just been cold, wet and windy.

Of course it's stopped now, but maybe we'll get more in the night. It'll make getting to work tomorrow interesting...