Just call me the Original Party Animal!

I had a fabulous time last Thursday evening! I was in a pub, drinking a cup of tea, knitting and reading Winnie the Pooh! Let me explain…!

Thursday night is knit night for me. It’s my only regular social outing and so I always look forward to it. However, this week was a little different as my sore ear and the evil antibiotics were making me feel very poorly. I nearly didn’t go, but Ellie doesn’t really take no for an answer so off I went! This week’s meetup was in Copa, a bar on Wharton Street in Cardiff. I usually look forward to Copa weeks as they serve delicious toasted waffles with toffee sauce and ice cream, but as I hadn’t been feeling too clever I didn’t think that waffles were the way forward. Neither did a glass of wine feel like a sensible decision, so I decided on a cup of tea as a ‘comfort drink’! So there was I, knitting on my jacket and sipping my cup of tea for all the world like a very eccentric elderly lady who may have got a little lost on her way to her OAP’s coffee evening. Also, my loss of hearing meant that I was entirely isolated from the rest of the group except for when I had the opportunity to lip read! But then my friend J took pity on me/decided to show off (take your pick as to his motive!!) by letting me play with his brand new shiny Kindle! And oh my goodness how I want one NOW!!! I’d read all the blurb, and listened to the hype about the e-ink but it really didn’t compare with actually seeing one up close. At first glance, it looked like one of those display models you see in electrical equipment stores where they have a printed label on them to give an idea of how the display will look. The e-ink and the lack of reflection was really that good. The text size was variable, which was fab for me as I’m a fast reader with good eyesight so I was able to reduce the text size right down in order to get the minimum possible page turns!

Then J showed me the list of books which you could get for free and for incredibly cheap, which led me to Winnie the Pooh, which in turn led to my reading that for most of the rest of the evening! It was a very happy place for poor deaf little me! The easy click of a button to turn pages was ideal for a multi-tasking knitter – I was able to have the Kindle on the table in front of me and flick the page turn button between stitches for minimal knitterly disruption! And from a pattern point of view, it would be brilliant for storing patterns, even those with charts, rather than having to print them out.

So, in conclusion, I am fairly certain that the 3G Kindle will be a part of my (not too distant) future. The only problem then will be fighting for access with GG!

Should I suggest ‘War and Peace’ for him??

Handsome, my eight year old son has taken to reading in bed. Due to the somewhat fiery nature of his younger brother, I asked Handsome if he would mind going to bed at the same time as his five year old sibling (there would be hell to pay from Cheeky if Handsome got to stay up later than him!). The compromise was that Handsome was given a reading light by his bed and is allowed to read for three quarters of an hour past their joint bedtime.

Since July, he has been reading the Harry Potter books. According to Yahoo Answers, there are 3407 pages when you add up the pages from all seven books. He finished the last book yesterday. So in approximately 180 days, he’s read an average of almost twenty pages each day. Not bad, for an eight year old.

He was looking forward to picking out a new bedtime book today. He spent some time after school choosing a book, then looked forward to it for the rest of the evening. So you can imagine his disappointment when it didn’t live up to expectations! He came into the lounge about ten minutes after he’d gone to bed, saying that the chapters were only a couple of pages long, and that he thought the whole book would only take him about as long as a ‘Harry Potter’ chapter, so could I please help him to choose another book which would take a little longer!

Bless him! I found him another book to try, but now I’m wondering whether he needs something a little meatier?! Thanks to the ‘Harry Potter’ books he’s an even more avid reader than he was before, so I don’t want him to be put off by a couple of less than enthusing books! At the moment he’s reading a treasury of boys’ stories including stories like ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’, ‘Just William’, ‘Flat Stanley’ etc. When I see which stories from there he likes, I’ll be able (hopefully) to make more helpful suggestions! However, all suggestions from you guys will be more than gratefully received!

And another thing…

…I finished reading ‘Gone With The Wind’! Yay me! So, two down and eight books to go in my 2009 book challenge! But what to read next. I can’t decide. I have Easter weekend coming up, so maybe a little more free time for reading than normal, but on the other hand I want to do more crafting as well. Hmm. I think I might give that new poll-widget-thingy a try. Come on, people, help me out here!

These are the books on my ‘to read’ list that I actually have in the house at the moment, and so could get started on right away. I really would appreciate your help, as well as any comments (hint hint) about the reason for your choice! Give me some good recommendations for a holiday read! Please!

Nameless

This is to be such a ‘bits and pieces’ type post that I really couldn’t think of a name for it – hence the title!

I spent most of today in Cardiff city centre with my boys and mother in law, as she asked if she could buy them clothes for their birthday. It was like drawing teeth. Without anaesthetic! Neither child was really remotely interested in choosing clothes, but luckily remained polite for me. However, I ended up putting choices of clothes in front of them, and inviting them to pick their favourites. Cheeky got into it in the end, just as I was finishing the shopping, but never mind. We managed to get a couple of shirts and sweaters for them, so it wasn’t a complete disaster. And I bought a skirt for myself, which I absolutely love and changed into the second I got home. Yay, I can be a girl now and again!

Whilst shopping for shorts for Cheeky (for our holidays), he decided that he didn’t like any of the ones in the shops. He, happily conciding in opinion with me, dislikes the longer shorts that seem to be all that is on offer for boys at the moment. And so, in a spirit of frugality which is obviously being passed down through the generations, he and I decided that we will go through his clothes, find any trousers that are too short for him and we will then convert them into shorts – custom sewn to his preferred length! I love it! I’m happy because I get to reuse something rather than chucking out old clothes and buying new, and he’s happy because he gets the sort of  shorts he actually wants. Fabulous!

I’ve made a little progress on my works in progress, and I hope to carry on for half an hour once I’ve finished this post, although I’m very tempted to go to bed with the book I chose to follow on from ‘War and Peace’ – ‘Gone With The Wind’. I’m already a fair way through its 1050 pages, and I’m thoroughly enjoying it. It’s not a chore to read at all, which makes a pleasant change from my last choice!

I’m dying to cast on for my O W L S jumper, but I’m determined to finish my dishcloths and kitchen towel first. I think I’ll leave starting the hot pads for next week, because I don’t want to rush them. I’ve still got a couple of weeks until the deadline. I do have a mystery project to do before then though, which I had forgotten all about until today. More details at a later date!

I’m sure I had more to type, but my eyes are getting heavier and heavier so I think I’ll leave anything else until tomorrow.

Another good day!

Despite the rainy start, today has been another good day. It started with an early morning visit from Jo for coffee and toast, followed by the school run and a somewhat soggy wait at the bus stop. My policy of crocheting on bus journeys actually encouraged a lady to talk to me this morning, asking me what I was making and developing into general conversation about her jury service. It made the journey pass quicker, anyway!

Work was really good again. I’m definitely enjoying working in the week and having the opportunity to do more than one task at work rather than being stuck on the same one for eight hours on a Saturday! I also get to mix with more people and, while the Saturday staff are all lovely people, they’re all students and so we have very little in common. On weekdays, I work with more people of my own age, and people who have children, so more in common with me. Also, today my boss complimented me on my work, and the fact that I managed to achieve 101% productivity last month despite not having done lots of the tasks for several years before that. She told me that I was a valued employee and that they are always glad to see me, which was lovely to hear!

Handsome, especially, has been really happy since I’ve not been working at the weekends. He always meets me after school on a Thursday and Friday asking whether I’ve worked enough hours to stay home at the weekend. It’s very flattering to be so loved!

In HUGE news, last night I finished ‘War and Peace’! Yay!! 958 pages down, none to go!! I’ve not yet decided what I’ll be reading next. Maybe something a little shorter! I’m very glad though that for the rest of my life I’ll be able to say (with truth, honesty and conviction) that I have read ‘War and Peace’ all the way through!

I completed two more squares for my crocheted patchwork blanket today, in a sunny yellow colour. I was working on dark red yarn, but the ball was too big to fit in today’s choice of handbag, so I went for the 50g yellow ball instead. It was actually very cheering to be working with that yarn on the bus, when the rain and wind were conspiring outside to make it as miserable a March day as they knew how. I really need to work out how many squares I’ll need, although I had decided to crochet a huge pile before I made that calculation, so as not to put myself off the job.

I went to Shaws today and bought knitting needles for my Easter jumper project. I looked at their chunky weight yarn, but wasn’t grabbed by any of the colours so decided to do some online shopping instead. Does anyone have recommendations for online yarn shops for me? So far, my search has been more or less limited to Ebay, as I don’t have a lot of money to commit to the project and so I thought that might be my best bet for a bargain.

Right, off now to do some online yarn searches. It’s not the same as actually being able to see the yarn before you buy though. I’ve no idea why South Wales, and Cardiff in particular are so poorly-supplied with yarn outlets. People obviously don’t knit and crochet in sufficient numbers to keep the businesses profitable. Ah, to be wealthy and to be able to afford all the lovely yarns that I see advertised! I’ve entered all sorts of yarn giveaways recently though, so keep your fingers crossed for me. x

Desert Island MP3s!

This is a meme I dreamed up in the car on the way back from the farm, whilst listening to Classic FM, because I was thinking about my favourite music and wondering what my friends would name as their favourite tunes. That made me think back to Sunday mornings as a child, when Desert Island Discs would be on the radio, regular as clockwork, before lunch.

So, the rules;

1. Name five songs or pieces of music that you would take with you to a desert island for an extended/indefinite stay;
2. Name the book you would take;
3. And finally, name one luxury item that you simply couldn’t be without (this sort of assumes that you are dumped on the island with very limited resources and very little in the way of a set up camp).

Once you’ve done all that, tag at least three other people to take part, and link back here so that I can come and read your lists. Go for your life!

So, here are my favourite pieces of music;

1. ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ by Queen – never fails to get me up, dancing and happy!
2. Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ – obviously happy thoughts because of Torvill and Dean’s gold-winning ice dance in Sarajevo in 1984, but also I find it a really uplifting and energising piece of music.
3. Beethoven’s ‘Egmont Overture’ – I studied this in school, so can pretty much sing every note, and yet I still absolutely adore it!
4. Any of the songs from the ‘Mamma Mia’ soundtrack – again, I’ve seen the film and therefore have heard the songs many, many times, but each and every song from the film reliably makes me smile.
5. Ummm, I should have only said four songs, I can’t think of a fifth! I can think of dozens, but it’s trying to narrow it down! OK, have to choose, have to choose; Katie Melua, ‘Closest thing to Crazy’, for those chilling out moments. Done!

My book; I’d choose ‘The Assassin’s Cloak’ which is an anthology of diary entries from dozens of famous diarists through the years. I’d be able to dip in and out, and it’s a good big book so it’d keep me going for a while!

My luxury; no contest. I’d have to have an internet enabled laptop with a wind-up charger! And yes, I know that theoretically a broadband connection is unlikely on a desert island, but this is my dream, and magic can happen! The internet is my single biggest source of information about almost any new thing that I attempt to do, so would be ideal if I were marooned and needed to build a house, find fresh water, dig a latrine etc etc!

As to the people I tag; I pick Jo, WelshPurpleTree, Mum, Dad, Sandie, and Marita. If any others of you want to take part, feel free, and post a comment and let me know so that I can be nosey!

Update on Tolstoy

Well, not exactly an update on Leo Tolstoy himself; as far as I’m aware he’s still ‘on the other side’; this isn’t a post claiming some newly found psychic ability! No, this is a brief update on my attempt to conquer “War and Peace”.

I (re)started at page 175 back on the 20th February, and this morning hit page 385! Yay me! I think that this is pretty good going, given that a) it’s incredibly long and hard to read; b) I had conjunctivitis and tonsillitis and was poorly bad for a whole week; and c) I’ve been exceedingly distracted over the past couple of weeks by Colin Firth in both “Mamma Mia” and “Pride and Prejudice”! So, given those three excuses reasons, I’m proud of my progress! I’m now 40% of my way through the book, and it’s definitely getting more interesting! I’m longing for Prince Andrew to be all better and married to Natasha, even though it looks like his father will have to die before that happens. And I want to see what happens to Pierre, and how he resolves his melancholic temperament!

Oh my goodness, readers, it looks like I’m hooked! Well, maybe it’s not such a bad book after all, although any book that takes 400 pages to warm up probably is on to a loser from the start, to be honest. I mean, other than those of us who read it as a labour of love, and those who are forced to read it as part of their academic courses, who would put up with that sort of a slow start?

Anyway, I’ve set myself the (relatively) easy target of finishing it by the end of the month. My husband is amazed; he says he can’t remember ever seeing me take more than a week to read a book before, so this is setting all sorts of new precedents!

Back to the reading then…see you in a month!

The ongoing struggle…

…that is my attempt to get the whole way through ‘War and Peace’ is about to recommence. After I threw down the gauntlet (to read more books that we haven’t read before) earlier in a comment conversation with Jo, I feel as if I should get cracking with my reading. And so it is with great sadness that I’m putting aside ‘The Craic’ by Mark McCrum for a few days (weeks, months?) while I make another attempt at Tolstoy’s, umm, feat of endurance. Seriously, marriages have been shorter than this book.

I’m up to page 175 of my Wordsworth Classics edition (5 for £5 or £1.50 each, according to the sticker on the front cover) but don’t be fooled by the seeming high page number. There are 958 pages in total. 958! I’m sure, at this point, that the only reason it was ever successful in the first place is because noone wanted to admit that they hadn’t made it the whole way through, and so just said it was wonderful to end the conversation! But maybe I’m being unfair. I wouldn’t know, having only made it 18% of the way through the book. Oh bother. I really wish I’d not worked that out now! I’m deliberately not going to work out how many pages are left. I just don’t, at this point, want to know!

So, here I go. I’m off now then. Any minute. Off to sit in bed and read. Upsy daisy. Off I go.

No, I just can’t build up the enthusiasm. Please, someone who has read ‘War and Peace’, please leave an encouraging comment to help me through! I really want to get through it. I even enjoyed a few bits of it the last time I picked it up. I think it’s just the length and the small, small print which is extremely discouraging!

Right. I’m definitely going now. One minute past eleven. Hmm. I’m tired, and I’m taking ‘War and Peace’ to bed with me. I don’t think this will be a very productive night’s reading, but I’ll give it my best shot! Night then! Updates on the W&P progress as and when!

100 books

Stolen from Jo (who nicked it from someone else) is this 100 books list. I wrote something similar to this back-in-the-day about two years ago, and I still haven’t got round to reading ‘Gone With The Wind’ or ‘War and Peace’, although I did make a valiant attempt at the latter and got about a quarter way through – my goodness it was hard going! Anyway, in a similar manner to Jo, those I have read are in bold print, those I love are underlined and those I plan to read are in italics.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

So, I’ve read 48 and a quarter (you have to give me credit for getting that far through ‘War and Peace’), loved 15 and would like to read a further fourteen and three quarters. Interesting! Maybe I should set another target, to read those (nearly) fifteen books by the end of the year. What do you say, Jo, you interested in furthering your literary education and joining me?

By the way, given the amount of books my mother owns, I’d love her to do this exercise!

Birthday presents

As I mentioned earlier in the week, I celebrated a birthday recently. I had a lovely day, with presents and breakfast as soon as I woke up from my boys (breakfast actually made by my children!) and a birthday party that a six year old would have been proud of in the evening, courtesy of my mother!

My husband gave me two book about blogging, one called “No One Cares What You Had For Lunch – 100 Ideas For your Blog” by Margaret Mason, and the other is the ProBlogger book; “Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income” by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett. I’ve read the first book, which has given me lots of good ideas for the coming weeks! I’m in the middle of the ProBlogger one now, and it’s really good. I really enjoyed reading how the authors came to blogging professionally, and have already got some more ideas for my blog content from that book.

I know that some of you, my readers, are also bloggers. From where do you get your inspiration? Have you ever read a particularly inspirational blog/book/article which has turned your ideas of blogging around? Have you ever had to deal with blogger’s block? Why did you start blogging? Do you see yourself blogging in the long term, or is it just a transitional thing that you are doing right now? Would you like to be able to earn your living from blogging?