Done!

Just a quick post to share my almost finished scarf for Mr Click:




I had considered arranging it to day 'done' but it's not quite long enough, despite being around eight feet long!

I still have some finishing work to do on it but I'm pretty pleased with it.

And I've already cast on for my next project; another hedgehog!

Day Zero Project: Hit Step Target Every Day For A Month

This target is kind of linked to my target to go for a walk every week, and since we've got Tara this is something which turned out to be quite easy to achieve. Several years ago Mr Click and I got the Walk With Me 'game' for my Nintendo DS and started trying to increase the number of steps we were taking each day.

The white one is mine and the black one is Mr Click's. We've got slightly different step targets, but have both had good runs of achieving them. We've been a bit lax about checking them more recently but it's good fun to check how many steps you've taken if you've been on your feet or been on a new walk.

I managed to achieve this target between April and May last year, I think at one point my step target actually increased and I still managed to maintain it. I was pretty pleased with myself for doing that, even though I didn't keep it up and managed to slip back below my step target on several occasions a few days afterwards.

Having Tara certainly helps to keep those step counts up. Of course you do need to wear the step counter for them to count, it's a little bit frustrating to forget to put it on and then realise that you're missing out on steps later on in the day. I still wear it every day though, even if I don't check the steps. When New Year Resolutions come around in a month and a bit's time I suspect that checking my counts more regularly will be on the list.

Tired Tup Tup

As I mentioned on Monday, Tara and I went for a lovely long (and painful) walk on Sunday morning. I was pretty tired out afterwards but I got on with the day, albeit a fairly lazy day (largely spent knitting a scarf and writing out blog posts for the week ahead).

Tara on the other hand, she did this:

That's our sleepy Labrador draped across her daddy's lap. I've never known a dog as cuddly as Tara. She loves to snuggle up with people, especially with Mr Click.

Later in the day Grandad vacated his chair, so Tara decided to keep it warm for him while he was out of the room.

What you can't see in this picture is the fact that she was dreaming and her little cheeks were flapping around as she gave these little woofs. It was ridiculously cute.

And at the time of writing this, Tara's actually upside in Grandma's chair, in much the same sort of position.

Book 41 of 2013: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling

Do you have books that you come back to time and time again? For me they tend to be books that I associate with my early to mid teens. It was an age where a lot of stuff happened, like moving four hundred miles to a different country and starting a new school, making new friends and all that stuff. I guess it was a time when I was looking for comfort and I found a lot of it in the books that I read. Now I like to go back and revisit them and relive some of that security that I felt back when they were brand new to me.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is one of those books for me. I didn't get caught up in the initial hype back in 1997/8 when it was first released and everyone started going crazy. I'm one of those stubborn people who digs their heels in when there's a book that everyone is raving about. A family member knew that all of my books were going to be in boxes after the move and so ordered the four Harry Potter books that were out at the time and had them delivered to the new house so I'd have something to read when I got there. I read them twice during the first two weeks I was there.

In case you've lived under a rock for the last sixteen (woah! that's scary!) years, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is a children's book in which Harry, who has been raised by his disapproving (of everything) aunt and uncle, discovers that he is in fact a wizard and will shortly be attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Along the way he learns that his parents were a talented witch and wizard who were killed by the most evil wizard ever, Lord Voldemort; he also makes friends, learns magic and becomes a dab hand at wielding a broomstick. Then Lord Voldemort makes an appearance and little eleven-year-old HP has to do his best to defeat him.

I normally make a habit of rereading this series of books pretty regularly although I didn't get to them at all last year because I had so many other things to be reading. I didn't really realise how much I missed not reading them until I picked it up again this year and I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the series over the next few months (once again I've gotten a little bogged down with reading my course materials but once I'm caught up with that I'm sure my reading will be back on track).

Part of my reason for rereading it when I did was because it was due to be covered in EA300. I read it way back in July and thoroughly enjoyed the fact that it's a nice quick read which I can get lost in easily. I've lost count of the number of times I've read it and it's all so familiar to me. There are whole sections that I practically know off by heart.

Interestingly that kind of relates to why it was covered in the course materials. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was looked at alongside Philip Pullman's Northern Lights as being books intended for children (or in Pullman's case, teens) but which have been adopted as enthusiastically by adults. One of the things that I love about this series of books is the way that J.K. Rowling's writing style sort of changes through the books; this one seems kind of simplistic but by the last two or three they are so much more sophisticated. You get the sense that you're really following the children as they age, and at the same time I suppose that at the time they were being published the children who were reading them were aging alongside the characters; when the books were published both Harry and myself were starting secondary school.

One of my absolute favourite things about this book is how fully imagined the world is. I love how little mentions of things crop up later on as being bigger and more important. I love how the wizarding world is integrated alongside the non-magical world. And I love the way that the characters change and grow as the series progresses.

I can't wait to go on and read all the others in the series again.

An Eventful Walk

Yesterday I decided to take Tara for a nice long walk to tire her out first thing in the morning. We'd been off the island on Saturday so she'd missed out on her usual long Saturday walk, and woke me up at 7am on Sunday to tell me about it, so I figured I'd give her a long walk for a bit of peace and quiet to get on with my knitting. Plus I had an idea of what I wanted to photograph for my Project 52 picture and if I was heading in that direction it made sense to carry round in a big loop.

The problem was that there had been a heavy frost and so a large portion of the ground was frosted up. Not too bad on the grass, but decidedly slippery on the road. I couldn't very well turn back with my hyperactive Labrador who was very excited to be getting her walk, so I headed for the back gate. A short way down the road things thawed out and I decided that maybe it wasn't too bad after all. Besides, most of the walk was on grass and track paths so that was unlikely to be an issue for us.

I was wrong.

There's a small set of stone steps that led down to a gravel path and those were frosted up too. I tentatively tested the top one with my snow-booted foot and realised that this could be a bit dangerous. Icy steps coupled with a Labrador who thought mum was going just a bit too slowly caused me to rethink the way down.

There's a grassy bank on either side of the steps. It's steep but I figured it would be easier to go down that than to risk falling down stone steps. I mean, worst case you slide a bit, maybe fall back onto your bum.

Which is what I did.

About halfway down the slope Tara gave a tug on the lead, I leaned back, slipped onto my bum with a nice bump and skidded down the slope. I picked myself up at the bottom feeling a bit bruised, embarrassed, and wet, and on we went with our journey. After all, that was probably the worst bit over.

I was wrong.

The slope down to the path running alongside the beach was covered with fallen leaves. Wet fallen leaves lying on top of wet muddy grass. You can probably see where this is going.

Tara pulled forward, I said 'Heel' and pulled her back, the Labrador acted as a kind of brake but both feet skidded forward at the same time. And down I went. This time onto my thigh and knee, and almost onto the Labrador who shot away from me, pulling the lead off my wrist in the process. Once she had established that mum wasn't in fact trying to jump onto her, she came back to check I was okay. I picked myself up, brushed myself down and carried on.

For about three feet.

Then I went down again. This time into a branch which seemed very keen to get inside my rib cage.

I picked myself up. Again. And assessed the situation; ahead was a walk alongside the beach, a muddy-ish track leading to a path and road, a road which was leading uphill, but which hopefully would not be too icy because the sun had been on it; behind was a slippery track which I'd already fallen down twice, icy steps and an icy road. I decided to keep walking.

Luckily I only nearly fell over once more, when I tripped over a stone. There was a little bit more skidding and some very wet toes when I got dragged through a large puddle by a Labrador who thought that this was the best walk we had ever been on. We got home, wet, muddy and bedraggled (and that was just me!) but in more or less one piece.

And I'm thinking maybe the Shore Walk is one I should put off until the drier weather returns!

Project 52: Week 45 - Industrial

This week's photo was a little tricky because I live in a really rural place and I don't often see things which spark me as being Industrial. I had hoped to see some sort of farm equipment or building machinery that I could use as my photo but when nothing had presented itself by this morning I took Tara for a walk (which was very eventful, but more on that another day) to where we can see a power station on a neighbouring island.

I very nearly took my DSLR with me, but at the last minute switched to my little compact camera. This was a very wise decision because mere minutes after I'd taken this week's photo I slid down a bank on my bottom and by the time I reached home an hour later I'd fallen over a further two times!

Week 45: Industrial

It's not a great photo because I had to use the zoom to actually be able to get a decent view of the station and the sun was shining on the screen and I had a Labrador who couldn't understand why we had stopped and oh-my-goodness-why-can't-we-go-and-smell-that-brown-thing-over-there! But I like what it's a photo of; I like the tops of the trees, I like the big expanse of sky, I like the wind turbines and I like the power station in front of them. I think this is a photo I may try recreating on a less icy and muddy day with my DSLR.

I also played around with the shot on a website I spotted on BBC Click the other day. It's called Fotor and it's kind of like a Picasa-type site where you can add effects and simply edit your photos. I figured that this photo was the perfect one to play around with, though the end result is mostly just sharpened and contrast/brightness adjusted. I think it's an improvement on the washed out original:

The BBC site now has all the themes up for the weeks until the end of the year. I can't believe how close it is now. Next week is Masks and the week after that is Tools. I'm already thinking up ideas for those, and hopefully I'll be able to take some decent photos, instead of these 'ooh shoot, it's Sunday and I've not got a picture' posts that I've been doing during the last few weeks.

It's that time of year again...

Time to start cracking out the Christmas films!

We've got a little tradition of collecting Christmas films which we then go on to watch during the run up to Christmas. We've now got so many of them that we have to start watching them in November in order to get through them all, and each year we pick a different order to watch them in, just to mix things up.

The first year we were moved into our new home we watched them in order of the year they were made. This was good fun because it meant that we started with the oldest; the likes of Holiday Inn and White Christmas, then gradually moved forward until we were watching Disney's A Christmas Carol right before the big day. It was also interesting to see how things changed over time, the new technologies that crept in and some of the little bits which were kind of advanced for the time they were made.

Then last year I suggested Mr Click pick the order we watch them in, strongly hinting that I'd like to watch them in order of length (either longest to shortest or vice versa). He suggested alphabetical order and as I'd picked the last order we went with that.

This worked out well too although we did end up with a Christmas Carol week, then a little while after that we had another little batch of Christmas Carols. I quite enjoyed seeing how they all differed from each other; there are certain bits that every version, whether it's Muppets or CGI or live action all share, and then there are other bits which only occasionally get included.

This year it was my turn to pick the order we'd watch the films in and the collection has grown somewhat over the last couple of years. On one shopping trip alone we managed to pick up two more versions of A Christmas Carol so I decided to go for the order of length option that I'd wanted to do the year before.

I've also had to divide our films into Christmas Films and Not Quite Christmas Films. The Not Quite Christmas Films are the ones which you can watch in the run up to Christmas. The obvious ones are things like The Holiday and Love Actually, but there are others I associate with Christmas, like ITV's adaptation of Ballet Shoes from 2007. Christmas does feature briefly but it's not the whole part of the story or it originally aired around Christmas time.

All the Not Quite Christmas Films are scheduled for viewing in November (we've already watched two of them) then the Christmas Films will start in December. We've got The Snowman and Father Christmas at the beginning and we'll finish with White Christmas and It's A Wonderful Life.

And last Thursday we watched our traditional first film of the run up to Christmas; The Nightmare Before Christmas. We watched it with our Chinese takeaway and it was pretty much perfect.

Do you have Christmas films that help to make Christmas for you?