From a lunchtime walk today around work. The snow is melting. I thought it was interesting to see how much of an animal highway those hills are, the whole place is crossed with hundreds and hundreds of tracks. Those footprints above that look like they are from a bear must be from a badger?

I’ve called posts ‘grey skies’ before, in St Ives and Farmoor.

Snowy! On the way to work.

Gloria is being a trooper too :)

I made one! I took two pieces of corrugated plastic (good as it is light but firm and protective), glued felt to both sides of this, then sewed a fabric pouch for this to all go into, and I folded the top ends of the fabric pouch inside. The outside strip I actually glued around (I am a bit addicted to hot gluing things :)) and attached velcro. The fabric I inherited from my grandmother’s stash and the corrugated plastic came as packaging with records so it was all free, woo!

1. Beep likes to snuggle.
2. One friend reading another friend’s Soviet joke book, a lot of laughs ;)
3. Beep enjoying cat grass that I grew from a kit I was given at Christmas.
4. Ira.
5. The weather lately.
6. IPAD!! I have been loaned one and I love it. It’s my kind of gadget! I like to read lots of visual type sites about photography/design/cookery/art/gardening etc and this is perfect for that, much better than a computer. For the first time I am almost caught up with my RSS subscriptions. I am using the ‘Perfect RSS’ app which caches your feeds so you can read when not on a WIFI connection. My dilemma is about a case, there are so many ugly and expensive ones. The roll of fabric is there because I am trying to decide if I should make one.
7. Dinner at my mother’s house. Always nice! For dessert I brought over ice cream and made these brownie roll-out cookies dusted with a little bit of icing sugar. Tasty and I thought they were nicest the next day.
8. Pub. A crowd of us saying goodbye to a friend going back to Australia.

This is a pretty dead time of year in the garden but primroses stop everything being brown :) I keep pots of things on that piece of slate on the table when we aren’t using the table in the winter. The table is from IKEA that I painted with outdoor wood paint and let go a bit weathered over the years, the metal Habitat chairs are from Ebay, also painted. Putting assorted sizes of green painted picture frames on the trellis is another idea I had a few years ago to stop the winter garden and an ordinary fence looking too boring, they are weathering now but that’s OK. I think it looks nice in the summer too when the clematis and jasmine grows through it. Picture frames are really cheap from charity shops once they have lost their glass.

THIS is Little Horse with tiny little stumpy legs.

As seen on a very wintery lunchtime walk.

I’ve been talking lots of film pictures lately so there has been a bit of a posting hiatus while I work my way through a roll and send them off for processing. Soon! :)

I don’t plan to make granola in particular at this time of year but this seems to be when the urge strikes. I guess it is a time of year when you need all the cheer you can get while still trying to eat healthily. For this batch of granola I wanted to limit the ingredients to a few flavours rather than throwing in every nut and seed I have. I remembered that my dad gets a very nice maple pecan oat cereal from Sainsbury’s that I’d tried over Christmas so that was my inspiration. My measurements were roughly 500g oats (I used Flahavan’s organic porridge oats), 100g pecans, 100g sunflower seeds, 1/2 cup maple syrup, and 1/4 cup groundnut oil. Mixed, then spread on a baking tray, put in a medium hot oven, and stirred every 15 minutes until golden brown. I think the secret treat when you make your own granola is to make it pre-breakfast so you can have that first bowl with granola warm from the oven, preferably with a handful of blueberries on top.

I took this picture on Sunday morning before I took down the Christmas and birthday cards that we put across the dresser and radiator in the absence of a mantlepiece. I can see a cute gingerbread one from Marceline peeking out!

Between Christmas and New Year we visited Kew Gardens, I had been quite ill after Christmas with a horrible tummy bug so this was my first trip out feeling quite pale and delicate. We often seem to go to visit gardens in the winter, they certainly are quieter! :) My dad had strongly recommended we find the Marianne North gallery which is hidden away at the edge of the gardens, it is really interesting, I now strongly recommend it too. Afterwards we paid a very quick visit to the Petersham Nurseries tea house but they’d run out of lunch items so instead we went to Wallace and Co for a quick lunch.

A D Miller Snowdrops: A central crime story with interesting description of expat life in Russia.

Christopher Isherwood Mr Norris Changes Trains: Maybe not the best Isherwood? But it kept me reading, again it is an expat story, this one set within Berlin during the rise of the Nazis.

David Hieatt The Path of a Doer: My sister got this from Santa :) It’s a short book of inspirational statements, you might know the author from his setting up of the Do Lectures and Howies.

P D James Cover Her Face: The first PD James book, a whodunnit introducing us to Inspector Dalgliesh. After starting it I realised that I’d read it before but as I couldn’t remember who had done it I read it again. That sandwich is my Christmas sandwich which I look forward to it all year :) It contains a tiny bit of everything from the Christmas meal. That’s my dad in the background.

Caitlin Moran How To Be a Woman: An interesting book, part autobiography, part rant, part making very good sense, it’s good to see gender issues being discussed and in an accessible way.

Kathleen Jones A Passionate Sisterhood: Wives, Sisters and Daughters of the Lakeland Poets: The wives and children of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and the other surrounding figures of that circle, had difficult domestic circumstances and had to deal with illness, addiction, and hardly any money. An eye opener as to what it must have been like.

It is the time of year when many people start thinking about resolutions, me included. I generally like to have a couple as I do like a good ol’resolution. My smaller resolutions of last year were to sign my name with a capital ‘A’ unless writing to my family (just because) and to have a lunchtime walk every day unless I really really had too much work on, both of these were successful and things I will carry on doing. It was also going to be my year of action and getting various personal projects done. It was a year of a great deal of action, a highlight was our month-long USA road trip which we really really loved. However there are still some projects that had to be postponed due to being too busy so I am looking forward to getting on with these this coming year. One of these projects being moving house!

For this coming year I could list all sorts of resolutions such as brushing Ira (our fluffy ginger cat) every day even though she doesn’t like it and does her sad whhhyyyy face at us, vowing to clean the bathroom more often, making sure to post pictures on here more often, and trying to reduce the amount of junk email I get but I feel that these are things I will be trying to do anyway without needing extra resolve. So this year I only have one resolution and that, quite simply, is to give myself a kick and to not get side-tracked and to make sure to get the big projects done.

As well as resolutioning this is also the time for looking back on the year, while I immensely enjoy reading other people’s ‘best of 2011′ lists I feel in much more of a looking forward mood. If this is the time of year for reflection that my main feeling from 2011 is so thankful that I have such a great family and wishing good health and happiness for them in 2012. The picture above is from an adventure with them I never got around to posting where we had a crazy summertime party at the opera for my aunt.

So, happy new year! I hope it’s a good one for you and your loved ones! :)