befogged

The days of festivities went pretty well in this neck of the woods. Those who were in hospital were out of it in time to not have to spend the season in the ward, we are now properly installed and comfy downstairs (well, we could do with some more and more suitably coloured throws for the furniture but those are easy to pick up), and Al’s parents’ Christmas gift to us was to cover the cost of a cleaner to keep it shiny for as long as possible. Now that is an excellent present!

And thanks to some impressive subterfuge and perfect gift-arranging abilities on the part of Al, I am now the proud and very, very happy owner of a spinning wheel.

Here’s my spinning spot, in our newly-*done* downstairs (not that you can see too much of the latter!):

Squee!

And yes, it’s near a radiator, by a window, and with a good view of the tv. *Grin*. I have already discovered that there’s something satisfyingly contradictory about making yarn whilst watching Voyager

I’m finding the wheel easier to work with than spindles, now that I’ve got a little more used to it (helped enormously by guidance from Linzi, the very lovely Alpaca Spinner, whom we went to see on Monday - and with whose help Al smuggled a wheel into the car boot while I was playing with some of her wonderful alpaca on her Traddy and Traveller to see which I was more comfortable with!), though the lighter spindle I got recently helped a lot. I seem to lean towards quite fine singles, so it makes sense that I got on a little better with a lighter spindle and more so with a wheel.

I guess it needs a sprig of holly ideally (Greenery will really counterbalance the 450g of chocolate, the 285ml of double cream and the five eggs. I think I’ve put on weight just by looking at this thing - I have never made anything quite so frivolously calorific before but my goodness it looks tasty!), but it’s not quite Yule yet and I can get some of that tomorrow:

Yuletide greetings, all

I have spent the day so far cleaning and cooking, which is all terribly domesticated. However, every trace of dust, painting equipment, and random screws (because no matter what you’re having done in the house it always seems to generate more screws than there seems to have been things from which the screws could have emanated) has been evicted from downstairs and the furniture is back where it belongs.

All that’s left are the finishing touches - moving the tv and unit back down there, moving the birds back down there, hanging pictures, and investing in lots more throws for the furniture.

Just in time for us to collapse onto it for the festive season. Wooyay!

A book one, this time. It’s doing the rounds again - I think it first came round after The Big Read - but I thought why not? I don’t know about italicising ones I love, though. ‘Love’ is sort of the wrong word.

Instructions:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Underline those you intend to read.
3) Italicise the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them.

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 - bits of it, I spose
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 - why yes, I was a Literature student, why did you ask?
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - J D 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 Dreadful book. Highly amusing memories.
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - well, I might get round to it one day…
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
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 - Tried. Failed. Tedious as a tedious thing.
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 - Not after 100 Years, thank you!
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’ Diary - Helen Fielding Um, I know. It was just as good as I expected.
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 Albom
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 well, if I’ve read the complete works of Shakespeare…
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

7.48am.

I should think it’ll have melted by the time I get home again, though.