I had to walk through a very muddy field today, so now I'm yearning for these Wellies from Toast, I'm also hankering after £125 to pay for them! But really, a good pair of wellies last years and years, and they are so essential when I have the dogs to stay because those dogs (my parents dogs) just LOVE to stomp all over your feet in the mud. Plus, these are neoprene lined so you don't get cold damp welly feet ilke in the 70's. Maybe they will be on sale after winter.
I will never forget trying to get my wellies off when I was bout 8. I'd been out playing in the snow and my feet were so numb and frozen I couldn't get my boots off so I sat with them infront of the electric bar fire (big house but not a lot of heat). I used to do this a lot to thaw my feet, but this one day I was distracted and my wellies melted onto the metal grill of the fire!
Which bring up a sadder memory of trying to thaw out my guinea pig who had been alive in the morning when I went to school but had frozen when the weather suddenly changed. I came home at lunchtime and I couldn't get the frozen hutch door open to get them all out and into the house. I can't even describe the events, it's to sad. I hate to see anything suffer. Needless to say I could not thaw it out, unlike my cold feet. I love animals but I wish they would live longer.
My neighbours house has gone! (front door still standing on left)
It was there 2 days ago. I thought they were doing it up as there was a fancy new stove and new doors. They seemed to be doing a new roof too. But when I went round to get berries and check my plant pots the house wasn't there, just piles of debris lying on the spot where the house was. That's the freaky thing about a mobile home, they can knock them down in an hour or two.
Worried about what will replace it (and who?). It was an L shaped house so it allowed lots of light into my South windows in winter, but any new house will be a full rectangle, no more sunny winter days :0( They also tend to put new houses further off the ground which means even less sunlight and a big chance of a huge window looking right into the main body of my house. I guess I'll have to prioritise the fence and trellis I've always wanted there.
Cute pic of a baby in turquoise fancy dress fluff here.
Spur of the moment is great isn't it.
I went out to play with Daphne on Saturday afternoon and had the nicest time. Everything we saw seemed to be in shades of blue and/or yellow, the colours we each love. These are our feet on the lovely grey blue Edinburgh cobbles with a great flaking single yellow line and the yellow ball that Daphne found on the road.
We wandered slowly round the back streets of Edinburgh in the warm sunshine, camera in hand, nibbling tasty snacks, sharing stories (she tells good stories) and indulging in a mutual desire to scavenge... got a great set of castors off an old trolley/walker type thing, and a very nice chunk of wood. Today was too overcast to get good pics of the brilliant marshmallows she gave me, I will try tomorrow, the packaging is amazing.
But since then poor Daphne has caught a bug, get well soon Daphne. This is the monster Daphne drew on a blue garage wall, maybe he can chase the bug away?...
I've posted more of the pics from our great day on my Flickr page along with, at last, some photo's from the France/Italy trip.
I just watched a really moving documentary on BBC2 about a photo journalist David Gillanders.
I love to skip about with my camera capturing colour and pattern and sweet stuff, but he has the courage and skill to deal with the harsher realities of life. I was really moved by the coverage of his visits to the Ukraine to document the lives of the street kids there, moving and heartbreaking.
Sorry not to post a sample of his work but the contact button on his site is disabled just now so I can't get in touch for permission. Maybe later.
I just had to post this image from Onecrabapple at Art Tea Life blog cause it has so much about it I LOVE...
I love the 50's, I love turquoise with red, I love blonde, I love patterned fabric, I love white flowers, I love clouds and I love the glamourous look these women had, it's how I'd love to look if I looked different. But I'm Calamity Jane BEFORE they got her wearing a dress.It's not that I dislike dresses, in fact, if I've not already said, I collect vintage dresses in aquatic shades. I'm just not a dress wearer, unless it's for fancy dress parties. I feel very uncomfortable dressed as a 'lady'. Much happier in my gardening clothes.
And speaking of happy, I really am today (ok, it's now Fri but I've not gone to bed yet) because the tail end of the hurricane never came, no 4 inches of rain, no 75mph wind. In fact, it was THE most beautiful warm South of France type summery day.
I had cramp and still have a cold so I felt entirely guilt-free staying in bed with the sun shining on me and a wonderful warm breeze coming through the open window as I read a good book. I've not read in such a long time, it felt like total luxury even though my body was feeling less than tip top.
Later on, when I realised I was out of food, I took a really gentle walk to the Organic Farm shop for some quinoa flakes (makes a lovely light porridge, great with sunflower seeds, raisins and a little maple syrup). The walk was so good because the sun eased some of the sore bits. Everything had such a warm orange glow to it and the fields looked wonderful, some fresh and green, others the palest golden straw colours.
Afterwards I walked to the supermarket for a sesame snap (sadly they don't make them organic - yet) and discovered that Sainsbury's are selling a 100g bar of 'smoothy creamy' milk chocolate which is Organic AND Fairtrade AND costs only 79p! I tried but I couldn't walk past it, 79p! I thought it must be a mistake and grabbed one before anyone could put a new price on it. They do a dark one for 99p but they were sold out.
I have to say, it was good. Very milk choccy, so my skin will resent my by Saturday. I would definitely dry the dark one next. I balanced my brush with naughtiness by having lentils for dinner, lovely little Puy lentils with soya yogurt and a touch of Tikka Masala paste (Pataks, I swear by the stuff, but only the paste, not the sauce).
I hope this weather continues till I feel a bit better, I really want to have half a day wandering round town with my camera capturing images of Edinburgh and having coffee with Daphne before winter comes. Of course I'm also hoping to have coffee with Daphne in winter too, Daphne is great!
Most of these were taken in the shadows because the sunny areas were just way too bright, what a delight...
Today has been outrageously un-nice. may I moan a little? I feel the need, but you don't have to read it, you can just look at the sunny photo's...
I have a cold (runny nose, sneezing, cough, bad throat etc.). I have cramp (yes, THAT kind) and all the aches and weepiness that accompany. Blogger continues to take AN AGE to upload each photo (if it does it at all). I injured a calf muscle, both actually, but one is worse. I lost my house keys, my friends house keys and the key for where I cat sit. Something (?) bit me on my inner thigh, not an ideal place to be itchy. The wind ripped the plastic sheeting from my house (for those who are new to my blog I live in a moby and am replacing walls, but no cash for rotten outer wall so it's wrapped in heavy duty plastic - oh the shame). This is bad enough, but they say tomorrow is going to bring 75-mph wind and torrential rain with 4 inches in an hour!!! And to top it all I have to go to work on my day off for health and safety top up training. Boo hoo.
So glad I have sunny yellow photo's to cheer me up, though they haven't taken the sting out of the £59 bill to get the locksmith out to the house of cat sitting, aeee. But I did at least shamelessly flirt with the young locksmith (the power of painkillers to improve one's mood).
Oh, and they have ruined - ahem - 'improved' the flavour of my fave soya yogurt which I bought to cheer myself up, eugh, tastes 'healthy' now. Not that I dislike healthy, but I do like my treats to taste like treats. Fingers crossed Mr.P comes back from town with a chocolate covered Sesame Snap for me tonight. I LOVE choc sesame snaps. They are just the best little snack ever and so easy to pretend they are healthy because of the sesame seeds - we needn't trouble ourselves about the copious quantities of glucose syrup gluing them together.
Jewellery by Sayumi Yokouchi. I really love the "Ptelea Trifoliata" brooches (above)
all found at Velvet Da Vinci. Sorry the images are a bit fuzzy.
More easing of the eco guilt re my flight to France. This coat is part of the Autumn Winter Collection by IDEO (French) who make, so far as I can tell, Organic clothing. Mostly not my kind of thing but I like this jacket and I haven't posted on green design for a while. They are showing this year at the Ethical Fashion Show.
Also at the show is Rianne de Witte. I remember seeing these designs of hers in the past, not sure what her current work is like but it's clearly ethical if it's in the show...
detail from Carla's wedding dress
At last, sanity is returning. I woke up this morning and my first though was something other than the kiss. I can finally concentrate on other things. 35 years old and I've obsessed about it for 10 days. Let's face it, that's just not healthy, but it was SO good, the kind you always wish you could have but everyone tells you it's unrealistic and that those things only happen on films. I'm so happy they were wrong. Mr P said I was having the same reaction that folk have to a severe trauma, except that luckily my trauma was a positive one. All very strange.
Of course there were other good things too, which my un-addled brain can now focus on. It was just fantastic to see Carla, the Bride, again. She lives in London and I haven't seen her for 2 or 3 years. We met when we were at college building our portfolios to apply to Art College about 18 years ago (!) and became instant friends.
I'd never met anyone like Carla before, she was like me, super enthusiastic, wanted to make everything, keen to try new things. She was also hysterically funny and had the best hand/arm gestures of anyone I know. I thought she was really exotic, her parents are Portuguese so she had this great surname (though at the time she was skipping part of it, but I new it from another Portuguese family). And she looked stunning, all her features were amazing to me, I'd never seen anyone else who looked like her. Her liveliness just shine through in her features. A happy face.
Obviously you have to share the bride with the other guests but we did get time in the evening for a bit of a reminisce about our early days. She reminded me of things I'd completely forgotten like the time we spontaneously (Carla was great at inducing spontaneous action) turned up on the doorstep of a guy I liked. He'd loosely made an invitation to visit in the summer hols but clearly never expected me to make the long trip to the north of Scotland with my best friend without calling first! We didn't even know his exact address but hunted him down anyway (ended up going out with him for 3 years).
It turned out to be a fantastic trip with a lot of 'special' things happening. Carla said it was extra special for her cause she was more of a city girl and hadn't done things like just running into the sea fully clothed and then drying off your things by a bonfire on the beach. One evening as we walked along I noticed that when our feet scuffed the sand it glowed, turned out it was full of phosphorous, as was the sea so when the gentle waves rolled in it all twinkled and glowed magically.
One night, I think maybe the same night, we all lay on the sand by the fire with a bottle of whisky and watched shooting stars. The skies in the North of Scotland are so clear it's really easy to see lots if you have the time. Then the sky started to ripple. It was the aurora borealis, which I had never seen before! It was mostly whitish and very flickery, disappearing and then reappearing a jump away. We were so thrilled, it just seemed like a whole day and night of being utterly immersed in the wonders of nature, and for me it was with two people I loved so it couldn't get more perfect.
But it did. About an hour after the aurora ended we were still watching for shooting stars when the sky went green. More Northern Lights, but these ones looked so different, all colourful and moving in a more liquid way than the first (I may have the order of all this the wrong way round, it was so long ago). The whole experience was unforgettable.
I think Carla is a bit of a lucky charm for me, whenever I am with her the most wonderful things happen. Sometimes they are things that I've experienced before but somehow when they happen with Carla there they are intensified... like the wedding kiss. They become the best memories and for that I can never thank her enough.
Gosh, that's the most I've written in ages. More on the the wedding later, including the great guests but for now I have a week of cat sitting to do so I'll have to slow down on the photo sorting and blogging.
Details from the walls of the reception venue...
Lunch on the beach near Cannes, I ate an enourmous amount of fresh figs. And the ones I had on this day were the sweetest juiciest ever...
Even the underpass to the beach was filled with sunshine...
Isn't this grate lovely. The gutter runs right in front of someone's door and they had this gorgeous grate over it so they can walk in without falling in a wet hole.
Incase anyone is tempted to comment on my tanned feet (they are usually a bluey colour) let me tell you it is all fake. I was walking around thinking "ooh I'm such a nice healthy colour" but the locals in Nice and Cannes were looking at me like "Quelle horreur, I have never seen such a pale creature!". [pardon French spelling, not sure if it's correct and too tired to check]
I am back after a wonderful trip, a beautiful wedding, new friends, 2000+ photo's and the memory of the best kiss I have EVER had EVER (nope, no details on this blog)!
Before I start blogging I need to get my pics sorted from the wedding and not let it drag on like the Swedish ones. Luckily these don't need infinite adjustment as my camera settings were not fiddled with by professional photographers who thought they knew better. Clearly they know how to use a camera but they did not know the look I wanted from my pics and the Ice Hotel Wedding photo's came out all freaky.
First I am taking advantage of the sunny weather to wash the salt and sand, but not the memories, from all my clothes. If only mine could look this lovely when they are out drying...
