The first thing to note about today's weather was how warm it has been. 'Unseasonably so', said the man on the radio this morning. It was dry to start with but began raining lightly mid morning and has been raining on and off ever since.
There was a lot of power in the waves as they hit the cliff sending up great spouts of spray but it was nothing like the ferocity of yesterday's weather.
Some things have gone well today and some have not.
As I set off in anticipation of the charities' Christmas Fair in the Hall I met my neighbour going down to the shop. He told me that the fair had been yesterday so that was the end of that little outing. I'd had the date correct but written the wrong day. Bother!
But then I decided to ignore the light rain and go for a walk along the beach to stretch my legs and get some fresh air. Something to enjoy especially as I'd decided not to go on the group walk in the afternoon.
Walking along the beach and inspecting the debris thrown up onto the shingle by yesterday's powerful waves I noticed what looked like a bunch of small white carrots or parsnips. Luckily I remembered seeing a post about highly toxic hemlock water dropwort roots also known as dead man's fingers. These contain a nerve agent toxic to both dogs and humans. Simply picking them up can kill a dog. Not something you want to have on the beach. Especially as the first bunch I found was close to an old tennis ball. I binned the roots, warned a lady walking her dogs on the beach and posted warnings on the village FB groups.
It's not unusual to find branches and even small tree trunks on the beach but today there was a very large tree trunk along the side of the slipway which was covered in shingle. I was estimated the trunk to be about 30ft long until I calculated the length by striding alongside it. 15 strides made it more like 45ft long!
Back home I packaged up the truffles ready to be given as Christmas presents. I know it's only superficial but I think presentation makes a lot of difference as well as showing that somebody has made an effort.
The next success was finding the keys for the porch door. As I had a box of key label tags I labelled all the keys we have and will put up a small key box in the utility room for the spare keys. The front door key is still stuck in the door while Pete looks for the specific lock spray that he has somewhere.
Then I began an afternoon of baking. I started with a tried and trusted biscuit (cookie) recipe and made several batches of peanut and chocolate chunk cookies. They were definitely a success.
While they were in the oven I tried making honeycomb which was not successful. Possibly the wrong sugar or I didn't heat it enough. I made something sweet but it definitely wasn't honeycomb.
Next I tried a new biscuit recipe from FB to use up a tin of condensed milk before I was tempted to try one of the many fudge type recipes that keep appearing on my feed. I'm not sure about those biscuits though Pete has just tried one and said it was fine. Maybe not a failure but I shan't bother with that recipe again.
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