These have I lived
Apr. 24th, 2006 05:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
j4A surprisingly productive weekend, on the whole. I did a half-shift at Oxfam on Saturday morning and then dashed back home to take my car in for MOT (and got 10% off the MOT with Nationwide Autocentre just by signing up for their email mailing list, which I will unsubscribe from again as soon as it turns up and tells me how). They have the advantage of being about 5 minutes' walk from home, so while-you-wait was actually more like while-you-go-home-and-play-piano-for-an-hour. As well as playing I managed to sort out heaps of music, fitting as much of it as possible on to the bookshelves (which are just too small for some of my music, but fortunately all my favourites fit) and amalgamating the rest into one box (instead of six disintegrating carrier bags).
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addedentry came home from his shift at Books for Amnesty having stopped off at Limoncello on the way to get salami and fresh bread to go with the blue cheese that was lurking in the fridge -- a good lunch at any time, but a particularly welcome break from tidying.
More tidying in the afternoon, and a sudden burst of motivation got the lawn mowed, though not the edges strimmed: my already feeble efforts to work out how to fit a new roll of strimmer cable were put off even more by finding that during the months of disuse since its cable ran out it had become home to a spider which (even by my arachnophile standards) looked frankly terrifying. Instead I started pulling dead bindweed up from the end of the garden, and soon had a pile of dessicated vines which looked like the world's biggest hairball. The end of the garden looks almost tidy now.
Even once we'd given up on gardening the weather was still too good to waste indoors, so we went for a walk around the back streets of Romsey, following a path that led us round behind our garden (we'd hoped to see the difference in tidiness, but in fact could only just see the top of the house over the fence) and through a quiet estate full of bright flowers. I'm enjoying the names of flowers at the moment, just enjoying knowing them, so I pointed out pansies, primroses, wallflowers, aubretia, mahonia, forsythia, and a thing with raspberry-like leaves and fuchsia-coloured flowers that I keep seeing all over the place but have no idea what it's called. (It's the pink one in this picture, if anybody can identify it from that.)
Somewhere along the way we even managed to take some stuff to charity shops, though annoyingly, the EACH shop was closed, so we had to take our boxes of ornaments and suchlike to the CPL shop instead. (I'm not opposed to the idea of helping cats in need, but I feel children are a higher priority; at this point, however, my highest priority was not walking home again with two boxes of junk.)
On Saturday night we watched Doctor Who (it's almost becoming a habit; I blame that nice young Mr Tennant, who's jolly good-looking, really, isn't he) and then The Librarian: Quest for the Spear, an action-packed and heartwarming film about the triumph of The Library over the forces of evil. I'm hopingaddedentry will provide a proper review soon. I knitted all the way through both, but my hat still doesn't look anything like a hat, as I haven't got to the decreasing bits yet.
Sunday was Drive It Day, a day for increasing awareness of historic vehicles, and we'd hoped for a repeat of Saturday's weather to provide the perfect excuse for a gentle drive. In the end (after a long lie-in, vainly hoping for enough sunshine to make getting up seem worthwhile) we tookpto452 out anyway, despite the dismal drizzle and grey skies; I managed to get her in and out of our driveway's incredibly narrow gates without mishap (with about an inch's clearance on either side), she still ran beautifully, and even her tiny windscreen wipers held up surprisingly well against the rain. Perhaps she'll even get round to updating her LJ soon.
We might not have made it out purely for the fun of driving, but we did actually have a planned destination (albeit one only a few streets away, but we did a fairly rambling round trip!) -- a visit to Jón who has no LJ, to cadge what I thought was chipboard but I now know is hardboard, and unexpectedly receive a gift of a large fruit cake. Important internet research was conducted, including: identifying an accidentally-taped children's TV program which featured an exploding brain; failing to find opening times (but drooling over the menu) for the Three Horseshoes in Madingley; and trying to determine whether Hitler was really as deficient in the testicle department as popular propaganda had it. (Our findings were inconclusive.)
In a valiant attempt to carry on whittling down the towering piles of unwatched videos and DVDs, we started watching Passport to Pimlico on Sunday night; unfortunately, in attempting to turn on subtitles (as a workaround for the appalling sound quality which made the dialogue nearly incomprehensible) we managed to crash the DVD player such that it wouldn't even switch on or off. So our quiet night in ended up even quieter, sharing books at bedtime.
addedentry came home from his shift at Books for Amnesty having stopped off at Limoncello on the way to get salami and fresh bread to go with the blue cheese that was lurking in the fridge -- a good lunch at any time, but a particularly welcome break from tidying. More tidying in the afternoon, and a sudden burst of motivation got the lawn mowed, though not the edges strimmed: my already feeble efforts to work out how to fit a new roll of strimmer cable were put off even more by finding that during the months of disuse since its cable ran out it had become home to a spider which (even by my arachnophile standards) looked frankly terrifying. Instead I started pulling dead bindweed up from the end of the garden, and soon had a pile of dessicated vines which looked like the world's biggest hairball. The end of the garden looks almost tidy now.
Even once we'd given up on gardening the weather was still too good to waste indoors, so we went for a walk around the back streets of Romsey, following a path that led us round behind our garden (we'd hoped to see the difference in tidiness, but in fact could only just see the top of the house over the fence) and through a quiet estate full of bright flowers. I'm enjoying the names of flowers at the moment, just enjoying knowing them, so I pointed out pansies, primroses, wallflowers, aubretia, mahonia, forsythia, and a thing with raspberry-like leaves and fuchsia-coloured flowers that I keep seeing all over the place but have no idea what it's called. (It's the pink one in this picture, if anybody can identify it from that.)
Somewhere along the way we even managed to take some stuff to charity shops, though annoyingly, the EACH shop was closed, so we had to take our boxes of ornaments and suchlike to the CPL shop instead. (I'm not opposed to the idea of helping cats in need, but I feel children are a higher priority; at this point, however, my highest priority was not walking home again with two boxes of junk.)
On Saturday night we watched Doctor Who (it's almost becoming a habit; I blame that nice young Mr Tennant, who's jolly good-looking, really, isn't he) and then The Librarian: Quest for the Spear, an action-packed and heartwarming film about the triumph of The Library over the forces of evil. I'm hoping
addedentry will provide a proper review soon. I knitted all the way through both, but my hat still doesn't look anything like a hat, as I haven't got to the decreasing bits yet.Sunday was Drive It Day, a day for increasing awareness of historic vehicles, and we'd hoped for a repeat of Saturday's weather to provide the perfect excuse for a gentle drive. In the end (after a long lie-in, vainly hoping for enough sunshine to make getting up seem worthwhile) we took
pto452 out anyway, despite the dismal drizzle and grey skies; I managed to get her in and out of our driveway's incredibly narrow gates without mishap (with about an inch's clearance on either side), she still ran beautifully, and even her tiny windscreen wipers held up surprisingly well against the rain. Perhaps she'll even get round to updating her LJ soon.We might not have made it out purely for the fun of driving, but we did actually have a planned destination (albeit one only a few streets away, but we did a fairly rambling round trip!) -- a visit to Jón who has no LJ, to cadge what I thought was chipboard but I now know is hardboard, and unexpectedly receive a gift of a large fruit cake. Important internet research was conducted, including: identifying an accidentally-taped children's TV program which featured an exploding brain; failing to find opening times (but drooling over the menu) for the Three Horseshoes in Madingley; and trying to determine whether Hitler was really as deficient in the testicle department as popular propaganda had it. (Our findings were inconclusive.)
In a valiant attempt to carry on whittling down the towering piles of unwatched videos and DVDs, we started watching Passport to Pimlico on Sunday night; unfortunately, in attempting to turn on subtitles (as a workaround for the appalling sound quality which made the dialogue nearly incomprehensible) we managed to crash the DVD player such that it wouldn't even switch on or off. So our quiet night in ended up even quieter, sharing books at bedtime.
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no subject
Date: 2006-04-24 05:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-25 02:17 am (UTC)readreceived receipts aren't such a bad idea; just badly named and implemented and prone to exponential feedback.no subject
Date: 2006-04-24 05:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-26 10:56 am (UTC)(btw,
no subject
Date: 2006-04-30 09:18 am (UTC)That may even be my fault, come to think, from drunken rambling in the Blue, but probably not...