Sunny.

Bright and sunny again with little wind so still not that cold.

It was so nice this morning that we headed out for a pre-breakfast walk up to The Memorial. Short and sharp this walk is just right for getting the old heart pounding.

The job on the schedule today was to cover one Christmas cake with marzipan and icing. I've lost my enthusiasm for Christmas cakes and not even knowing if the recipients are keen on them I've decided not to carry on making them. I decorated this one with gold and silver sprinkles and added gold glitter which doesn't look as good as I'd hoped but will do.

Once the cake was done and the kitchen cleaned up I wrapped up a few presents. That led me to put in a late present request to Peter for a proper Sellotape dispenser, the kind we used to have in school. I love wrapping presents but get so frustrated when the Sellotape curls over on itself so that you're trying to hold the paper at the same time as cutting the Sellotape and end up with a less than perfectly wrapped present. I keep meaning to try out some of the beautiful Japanese ways of wrapping presents too. 

Although we're in the wrong position to catch the setting sun we can still enjoy the sight of the golden glow on the houses along the beach. A little later I almost caught the sunset on camera though it was even redder and the sky lighter than in my photo.

With more restrictions coming into effect this drive past by Santa (Sion Corn) with music blaring is probably the nearest we'll get to any sort of party this season.

A moment of IT excitement - I was trying to see if I could find an 'o' with a hat on for Sion when I came across a way to turn my spellchecker back on. My spelling has always been suspect and without a spellchecker I've had to open a new tab to check on doubtful words. Now I shan't need to be doing that.

Sunny.

Lots of sun today and mild temperatures.

As I was making breakfast this morning a little ginger face appeared at the door. By the time I'd fetched the camera Speedy arrived and pushed past Ginger Cat who moved respectfully away. By their interaction I don't think this is who Speedy has been scrapping with.

Straight after breakfast I took my parcels down to the Post Office and thankfully my kitchen scales proved accurate and I didn't need to repack that parcel.

Naturally the good weather drew me to the beach where I had a refreshing walk. It was so lovely to be walking along with the sun warming my back.

At first I thought this small (3ft) conger eel was a tusk or horn of a prehistoric animal before realising it was just a fish. While that was not such a far fetched idea as prehistoric elk antlers have been found washed out of the pertrified forest bed considering how many dog walkers would have passed that way already it was a bit silly. Further along the beach was the very large carcass of a big, 7ft at least, seal and less unpleasant was a 20 ft tree trunk high on the shingle.

The driftwood reindeer has made its appearance and I expect it looks magical when the tiny tree lights wrapped around it are lit up. I will admit this was what gave me the idea for my outdoor driftwood tree.

Back home I did a bit of work in the garden cutting back a holly tree/bush that had grown into the hedge. It needed doing as it was adding to the width of the hedge which I've been working on reducing as stretching to cut the top of the hedge is bad for my ribs. I was able to use the cut off branches with their top knots of spikey leaves to fill a couple of holes in the hedge which allowed people to look through to the terrace.

Then I finished off two felted tree decorations giving the hen some beaded legs and adding one red bead to the bauble which Peter says now looks like a hot air balloon. 

After piano practice which has been lacking during my baking and making week I still had time for an hour of Welsh practice. DuoLingo is great for lots of repitition the only drawback being that it uses South Wales Welsh and there's no option for North Wales Welsh. 

 

Grey.

Mild, grey and dry today.

Spent the time after breakfast preparing for our Welsh class. I'm aware that with so much Christmas preparation to do I'm not finding the time to do as much practice as I'd like to do. Somehow I seem to have much less spare time than Peter. He does shop, cook and wash up (as do I) but cleaning and laundry and general tidying mainly falls to me to do. And then I take on extra projects like making things for Christmas and organising presents for family. So I've mainly got myself to blame. In our class today we finally arrived at the dreaded mutations. That's when the letter before a word, in today's case 'o' causes the first letter of the next word to change. I guess it will all makes sense eventually. Something must be going in because earlier I was playing scrabble on my Kindle and having made the word caws meaning the noise made by rooks, a little later as the word crossed my vision I read it as cowss   meaning cheese.

After class my scheduled job was to pack some parcels ready for posting. That was quite time consuming as although I'd carefully been saving boxes that were the correct 'small parcel' size for the Post Office I'd failed to consider how I was going to safely pack a Christmas cake. Eventually I found a smaller cardboard box but with some other items in the parcel the total weight is only 50gms under the 2kg limit. If my kitchen scales aren't accurate I may have to repack that parcel. The chocolates above aren't being posted but I just wanted to show how effective discs of chocolate with sprinkles on can look. The box is one I'd saved from a present last year.

Romas' two week tour came to an end last night. Below is a photo taken by his older brother when they played Brighton. I've been able to see most of their gigs via videos they've put on FB every day. It's the same each time but this proud mum is simply happy to watch her boy on stage. They had a decent review in The Brighton and Hove News too and their latest single has been played twice on Planet Rock.

 

Zoo Day.

Mild, grey and dry today. There was even a little sun in the morning.

It was very quiet at the zoo. I expect there may be children turning up at the weekend or next week to visit Santa's Grotto before the big day. Due to the rampant Omicron variant it was announced yesterday that primary schools (4-10 yrs) in Wales will close this Friday. I expect that the children will only lose a few days from next week but I remember that as such a fun time with the children with Christmas activities and a general relaxation from the relentless grind of testing and assessment that goes on these days.

I can't get a decent photo of the Cayuga ducks through the wire which is a shame as they are such an amazing green and black colour.

Today's work was hard on my back because I decided to remove the brambles from one of the perimeter spaces. I could just have cut down the above ground growth and from the size of the roots and stumps that is what happened before but that's not the way I garden. Instead I dug and pulled and yanked out the substantial roots. I got over half the brambles out this week and should finish in my next session. On the way to dispose of  my muck bucket of roots and leaves I stopped to talk to the pygmy goats, as you do, and discovered they are quite partial to bramble leaves. Apparently they won't eat any growing in their enclosure but I guess things taste better when given over the fence. Not to mention a complete lack of visitors bearing portions of vegetables for the goats and rabbits. On these grey and gloomy days everyone gets on with their jobs and there's no sitting round the tables in the courtyard chatting over cups of coffee. I did however have a very nice chat with two lads, 18 year olds that also volunteer. They had such a good attitude to life and our conversation ranged from politics and religion to nutrition and exercise.

While I was standing up on the playhouse I saw the small local train that connects us with town in one direction and out to England in the other. Such a shame that train fares are so expensive being many times more than the fuel cost of driving in a car. Not much of an incentive to reduce car use. Prince Charles turned up in Aber a few days ago and caring for the environment as he does (yup, I'm being ironic) he arrived in a helicopter.

This afternoon's Christmas job was to dip the truffle centres in chocolate. All I'm going to say is that it's not worth trying to temper chocolate at home. Not even if you have a digital food thermometer to get the temperatures exactly right. Maybe using Lidl's chocolate, which is very good didn't help. I expect you need to use more expensive chocolate to get a proper shine. There was a bit of a shine to the chocolate but not enough to justify the effort or leaving the kitchen almost looking as if a chocolate fountain had exploded. That might be an exaggeration but there was an awful lot of washing up to do. I tried one truffle and the coating did have more of a snap to it but next year I'll simply coat the centres and throw sprinkles and glitter over them. Much easier. I used the remains of the melted chocolate to put a blob on each of the cranberry biscuits. Topped with a single cranberry and some red glitter they still look very rustic but Peter tells me the one he taste tested was delicious. The final dregs of chocolate were turned into discs topped with chocolate and sugar sprinkles.

 

Grey.

Grey all day today with light rain for most of the time.

Peter had to go to the hospital this morning to be fitted with an ECG for 24 hour monitoring again. I went with him to take the car down to park at Lidl. I had a few things to get in town including some waterproof over trousers which I got on sale at Tresspass. Now I don't have to borrow Peter's ones which I have to roll over at the waist.

I called in at a couple of the charity shops and got this necklace for its red glass beads. When I checked my bead collection to complete a decoration I'm making I'd found that I didn't have any red beads so these will come in useful plus it's money to a good cause. 

The job on today's schedule was to make truffle centres. When I went into Lidl I was taken aback to find no double cream. They had the fake stuff but for real cream they only had brandy or Bailey's laced/flavour cream. I thought about trying one of those but didn't think they would go with the different flavours I was planning to make. Instead I took a chance on our local shop and there they had a grand total of three pots of double cream. It's such a lot of work making different truffles that I'm going to put a note on my recipe to make only one kind next Christmas using cream with Bailey's. The centres are now sitting in the fridge ready to be dipped in chocolate tomorrow.

Grey.

Still mild with a light sea mist in the air. At first we could see the low clouds forming below the hilltops then eventually everything turned grey and the rain beagn to fall in ernest.

Last night we had a text telling us the builders would be here in the morning to start putting in the ventillation for the loft. 'Morning' means any time from 8.00 so I was woken by the alarm at 7.30 which I'm not used to. In the end the lads didn't arrive until 10.00 but maybe my early start will help me fall asleep earlier which wouldn't be a bad thing. I've spent the day making cups of tea for the lads who got very wet working outside fitting the vents to the underside of the roof overhang. We still need some sort of fittings to go inside the loft to keep the insulation from the vents but apparently they 'haven't arrived yet'. (The lads' boss is well intentioned but he takes on too much and rushes his work.) The lads are the same ones we paid to put all our stuff up in the loft and they were most apologetic about the way things are up there but it's not their fault. They are being supervised, or not by the boss and he's the one who should have checked the work or at least got on with sorting things out once we found a problem. 

Over breakfast we watched this chap catching waves on his SUP. There were also some surfers but he had the advantage of being able to paddle out to where the waves started and standing up he had a much better view than the surfers who were down at sea level.

Today my Christmas schedule said - bake biscuits. By the end of the day I remembered why I only do this once a year, it's very much a labour of love to do this for my boys. The biscuits below are only half of today's total the other half being my own invention where I added dried cranberries to the mixture. That made the dough more difficult to roll and cut out so I went for smaller, thicker biscuits. When I took them out of the oven they simply looked like thin fruit scones not fancy Christmas biscuits. Or even my version of Christmas biscuits. I thought some red or pink icing with a swirl of white would smarten them up but when I added some red food colouring to my bowl of icing it turned an odd shade of orange (I should have remembered from the last time I used it). I carried on but that did nothing to improve the look of the biscuits. I ended up scraping the icing off and instead will dip them in dark chocolate when I melt some to cover the truffles I'll be making later in the week.

Once the lads had fitted the vents they went up into the loft to clean off the mould and wipe down all the rafters with mildew killer. Hopefully that will be enough. We shall be keeping an eye on the loft to check that nothing else appears. At the same time we'll keep the dehudifier running and badger the builder until he turns up with the inner vent fittings. 

 

Craft Fair.

Mild and wet today. It was what we in the West Country call mizzle, a fine but soaking rain.

Today was the day of a craft fair held in a converted chapel which is our local arts venue. Borth and the surrounding area is home to a number of artists and crafts people so as I expected the items on offer were rather special.

Wanting to support local ventures I went hoping to find a couple of presents which I did (will show them after Christmas) but I wasn't so succesful in finding something for our home, kind of a self gift.

As ever my eye was drawn to the ceramics. I knew they would be expensive but if there had been something perfect that I could immediately envision on display in our home I would have induged but nothing called to me in that way. I did like the large bowl with the blue base and white top on the left but it was £48 and not quite ideal.

I do love this lady's felted items but I think I ought to be making my own. I would have bought the piece of driftwood painted with the three cross seagulls on the right but not at £85.

In the end I bought some printed greetings cards and this hand painted slate. At 4" high it's too heavy for the little tree but I like at as an all year round decorative item. 

This is how Speedy spent most of his day.

When I got back from the fair I found that Peter had already heaved our dehumidifier up the ladder into the loft and all that was left for me to do was to go up and search for the little lights and the tiny tree animals. I found the lights easily enough but I wasn't until I thought again that I remembered the little animals were in a big box of gift wrap items. I think I better leave a note inside the box of tree driftwood to save myself spending time searching next year. I moved the tree onto the desk as the cupboard top was getting too crowded.

Today's baking task was to make the Lebkuchen. I find the hardest part is dipping the biscuits in melted chocolate. To have enough chocolate to get an even 'dip' I'd have to use at least double the required amount of chocolate which would be a bit silly.

I prefer to use freshly grated nutmeg instead of ground and I just had to show the miniature grater I use for this.

Off now for supper and Strictly after I've gone up to the loft to empty out the dehudifier.