Yuck.

Wet.

I'm fed up with this flipping cold. After a reasonably good day yesterday I woke this morning feeling rough. I guess as you get older it's harder to shake off a cold. 

I haven't done much at all today spending a lot of time with my feet up watching Call the Midwife. Some of that time was spent brushing a fluffy top I'd washed to get the pile fluffed up again. Later I went through a box of Romas' papers before putting them out for recycling tomorrow since Romas doesn't want them. I did keep some of his old certificates just in case.

The last thing I did was to go through a box of vintage jewellery (and stuff) that my mother had collected over the years. I kept a few items but most of it will go to Oxfam with a note saying they need to get an expert to check though them. The more money they make for helping people in need the better.

 

Not Raining.

We've had a dry day, not too cold in the morning but colder in the afternoon as an easterly wind began to blow.

We went to Mach this morning and had a hilarious time in the library as we went over this week's lesson notes and translated more of the book we are reading. So many words are similar, at least to us and then Elaine and I both mixed up Gelert the sheepdog with Geraint an unpleasant man and wondered why the man had been stolen and put in a truck. Well, both names start with Ge and end in t.

Having dropped Peter off to play pool at the pub I devoted the rest of the afternoon to going through more of my clothes. I'm on a roll and ended up with another stack of clothes to go to the charity shop. I've finally admitted that although I can get into them (just) there's no need to keep size 12 Per Una jeans. Nor do I need a vast selection of belts. I've saved a few but the rest are in the charity shop bag. 

My final small task was to repair a small hole in my childhood teddy's jumper. Part of a set my mother knitted for him. At nearly 69 years old the poor old chap has hardly a hair left on him. I also discovered the fabric on one paw had completely worn away. I couldn't leave him with the stuffing hanging out so made a repair with some brown velvet.

It's not surprising that he is so bald as I was given him for my first birthday. (I have a feeling my mother removed his eyes immediately as she was a big worrier and thought I would choke on them. Poor old Ted.) He was a great comfort to me when I went to boarding school at the age of six.

You can see he's wearing his knitted suit here. This photo was taken in my friend's garden near Kew Gardens and I would have been maybe 9 years old.

C6B, T5F ?

If I hadn't already decided not to go on the walk today the steadily worsening rain which reached a state of deluge by mid-day would have put me off.

We had our usual leisurely breakfast listening to The Archers. Then before starting on my main project I browsed a couple of fabric sites and ordered some samples. Hopefully one of those will be a better colour match for the wardrobe curtain.

That done I turned to my knitting project which I was determined to complete and by the end of the day had done so.

Yesterday I had experimented with using three colours of wool on a simple cable but that didn't work out. Instead I turned to my encyclopaedia of knitting stitches and found a Celtic cable that looked interesting. I don't often knit which made it a challenge but I'll give anything a go. I had instructions so what could go wrong? I found out that dropping a stitch in the middle of a pattern composed of cables and twists where sometimes it was three stitches on the extra needle and sometimes two took a long time to put right. Peter came in at one of those moments and beat a hasty retreat when he heard me counting and muttering darkly. It got easier each time I completed the eight pattern rows and using blutack as a marker helped me to keep my place both on the main pattern and on the explanation of the codes for the stitches.

I was very glad it was only a small cosy that I was knitting though long ago I knitted Peter a chunky traditional Aran sweater. He still remembers it but no amount of hinting will get me knitting a replacement.

Wet.

It's been raining heavily all day long. The surfers have been out, it is the weekend, but the waves were not a patch on yesterday's clean sets.

My busy Friday and this rotten cold got to me this morning and I felt quite groggy when I woke. A lie-in with soothing cups of tea and coffee helped a lot and I've spent the day getting on with things but at a slower pace than usual.

I set myself three tasks to do to satisfy my need to feel that I achieve something every day. First I cooked up another batch of stewed apple. Some of the apples from the big bag I bought went to top up the fruit bowl and rest were for stewing and freezing. That works out better value than just buying six apples to eat in the week.

My next task was to see what I could do about changing the wardrobe curtain. The curtain that goes across what once used to be the shower matches the window curtains but apart from being too short (though I have more fabric to add on a bit if I want) I would prefer to have a plain curtain.

I had hoped to reuse some lightweight cream fabric that had been across the wardrobe at Dingles but after pinning it up I realised it was too yellow.

Yesterday I had bought a cream bed sheet (M&S, £2 at the climate shop) which I shortened and pinned to make the lining for the new curtain. It also is not quite the right shade of cream (Dulux magnolia to be exact) to use as the actual curtain so I will need to be a bit more careful with my colour matching. I may even send off for some fabric samples to buy new.

I started some knitting or at least picked out the wool to make a cosy for the new metal travel mug that I bought for our library meet ups as the handless one I have sometimes spills a bit on the way home.

In general a very quiet day.

Thanks, Bob.

We've had a dry day with a lot of sunshine. There must be some serious weather going on out at sea as when I got home the bay was a surfer's paradise with large waves were coming in cleanly at regular intervals. Perfect for surfing.

Bob (of the title) was not my ride for the lesson that was still my lovely Tex, but  his morning Tex was standing in the stall next to Bob's stall. Bob has his own extra wide space as he's a very large cob.  

As I brushed the worst of the tangles from Tex's mane Bob kept leaning over the dividing wall giving me lots of nudges. Very sweet apart from the fact that Bob's muzzle with its magnificent moustache (Tex also has a moustache) was dripping wet after he'd had a drink from the wall mounted water trough. Of course I gave Bob some pets despite getting a soaking each time he had a drink.

We had a good lesson and after doing some work without stirrups went on to do the canter exercise again. But because there were seven of us and we were struggling to get canter Iola changed things so you had to wait for her to call you name and say which colour cones to canter round. After a couple of false starts Tex went well but we didn't get too many more chance for a canter. At the end of the lesson we were told that all of us need to work on our canters. Fine by me. Next week should be better as there will be another adult lesson at 12.00 and so far there are only four of us for the earlier lesson.

After riding comes shopping which I enjoy. Of course these days I'm in no rush nor do I have small children to supervise and we are in the fortunate position of being able to afford the things we need.

Not being in a rush was good today as after the cashier had had rung through some of my items his till closed itself down (don't you love technology?). Apparently that had been happening all week. As I unpacked my items so they could be rung up again while the till rebooted itself the supervisor suggested to the next customer that she moved to a different till. Then as a goodwill gesture to make up for the inconvenience she said I wouldn't have to pay for the first item which happened to be a bag of frozen blueberries. Not bad since they've gone up to £3.35. (Lidl's ones are small and are often already tasting mouldy.)

Then I went off to town. I took a bag of empty table blister packs to Boots for recycling and just for the fun of the hunt had a look in some of the charity shops. I was running my fingers over the rail in Oxfam when I came across this over-sized shirt in a deep purple/blue. Wondering if my fingers were telling me the truth I checked the label and sure enough it was pure silk. And at £5.99 a real bargain. It will be a perfect cover up for taking on holiday and weighs almost nothing. It's disrespectful to go into Cretan churches or monasteries with bare arms and I may need to cover up from the sun as well.

My shopping adventures did not end there. Every week at Lidl I buy seven bananas to go on our porridge. I generally pick a couple of yellow and the rest green to ripen through the week. But last week's green bananas were still green and inedible today a week later. I took them back to Lidl, no receipt of course but they offered a refund straight away. To make things easier the chap simply gave me this week's bananas at no cost so we ended up with seven for the price of five. 

Bitterly Cold.

The pink of the dawn thankfully was not followed by rain. Instead it's been a clear day with few clouds until later in the afternoon. All day long the strong easterly winds brought the bitter cold. (A quick check of the forecast says 7C or 8C tomorrow morning so no need to put anything over the car windscreen.)

We had to be up early this morning as Peter had his regular appointment at the hospital for an injection into his knee. Parking is impossible at the hospital so I drove down into town to wait for Peter to let me know when he was ready to be collected. I just had time to drop off some stuff at the Climate Shop and stock up on throat sweets before he phoned.

We were home in good time to prepare for our Welsh class. I joined Zoom with plenty of time to spare, checked the sound and video then at the last minute the timer went round and round without connecting. I ended up having to turn my PC off and starting again before I could join the class.

The class didn't seem too hard today. Though we did start with a lengthy dictation. I struggled to write quickly enough but our tutor read the passage through twice so I filled in most of my missing words. It's the prepositions that catch you out. Y, yr, i'r and ar all sound similar so you have to rely on which one would be correct grammatically. Then we went over adjectives to describe activities/ tv programmes while also learning the sentence structure to use when saying I think ...... in Welsh which is quite different to the English. Luckily I've come across it a lot in Duo and in my head translate it as I think that ...... which is not quite accurate but works.

After class I needed to get some milk and also to pick up my prescription from the pharmacy. Naturally I combined that with a beach walk where I tried to capture the light on the waves.

With so many variables; the sea, the wind, the light and the tide the view is constantly changing. Something I never get bored with. You can understand why artists love to paint the sea. I'll make do with my trusty camera.

Sunny.

Today has been bright and sunny with very little wind and not too cold.

I felt a bit rough with this cold so it took me a while to get going in the morning. On days like this I make a mental list of things to do- things that must be done, things that it would be good to do today and things that will need doing at some point. Once I've completed the 'must do' jobs (the morning routines and today putting out the recycling) I can relax and anything from the other two lists is a bonus. 

I hand washed a few things (shame there wasn't much wind) and sorted some stuff to take to town tomorrow. But then my attention was caught by the sun shining into the corner of the front garden. My carefully thought out lists were abandoned and I had went out to cut back the dry stalks of the Michaelmas dasies that grow in the far corner. I had to be careful not to damage the leaves of the tall Dutch? iris that  are also in that corner. I went on to do a bit more tidying in the garden and ended up filling a whole sack ready to go to the dump on Friday.

I finished off the afternoon with some ironing and then chopping of veg to go with the salmon (baked in foil parcels) that we will be having for dinner tonight.