Cold.

Cold and wintry today with a shower or two in the afternoon.

We began our day with oatcakes for breakfast filled with scrambled eggs cooked with ham, bacon, mushrooms and a sprinkling of cheese. It was a gargantuan breakfast (please note those are side plates not dinner plates) which certainly set us up for the day. Peter found it quite stressful getting it all ready to serve at once and there was a fair amount of clearing up to do.

I had planned to begin the Christmas biscuit baking but when I checked out the state of the oven I saw that I had a lot of cleaning to do first. I don't think Peter even minds if the shiny new oven shelves become brown with baked on grease or if he's expecting the oven fairy do the cleaning but there's no way I was going to leave them like they were. I have to say I made my views on the subject loud and clear.

While as much of the shelves as I could get underwater were soaking in the sink with a dishwasher tablet I took myself off for a walk along the beach. I needed to walk off the breakfast and Peter was running low on the teabags he likes which I get from the Co-Op. 

The tide was still coming in bringing in a variety of seaweeds. 

Today's unusual offering was a copious amount of cut reeds a few of which can be seen in the entirely natural arrangement of pebbles below. At first I wondered if they had come from somebody's garden but there were cut stems all along the strand line for the whole of my walk. Far too many and it's not really a garden plant/weed. My best guess is that they come from maintenance work around one of the two rivers Dyfi and Leri or one of the streams. (The welsh word for river is Afon pronounced Avon so the River Avon is really the River River.)

Back home I finally managed to clear the top of the desk in the sitting room just in time for the first Christmas cards. The scrubbing of the oven shelves and a couple of the trays took over an hour so I was glad to sit at my PC desk and begin felting. Even though there's hardly any work space it means I can look at reference photos while listening to the radio. Today a dramatisation of A Girl Called Jack by Jack Munro. (She wrote a blog about cooking on a miniscule budget while living in poverty.) The felting is coming along nicely. I've used collected wool to create the main structure over a pipe cleaner skeleton which will give it strength and flexibility. 

The builder was here all day but he's waiting on some materials so won't be here tomorrow. Hopefully he'll be back on Friday.