Breathing Space

I was just wondering whether or not six months was long enough a break from blogging. I decided that it was. I've been busy in a good way, enjoying good company and making memories. My parents spent a week with us in April, my brother with my sister-in-law, niece and his friend's family were here earlier this month. One of them has stayed to experience the Irish summer. *insert rain here*

There's too much to put down in words, so here's some photos instead:

I've been walking here:

I've enjoyed the summery weather:

I've had a few lazy mornings:

I've had a few nights out featuring this:

And a few nights in featuring this:

I've had fun with these:

I've been reading these:

I've seen some amazing sunsets from our front porch:

And I've spent some quality time with these:

See you soon!

Duvet Days

It's been raining heavy for what feel like weeks now. I'm sure it's not actually weeks but nonetheless, that's what it feels like. Outside everything is saturated, soggy, sopping wet. The rain is like a relentless morse code tapping on the roof, pausing every so often to catch its breath, showing a glimpse of a blue sky and a ray of sunlight coming through before picking up where it left off. It's the perfect weather for a duvet day.

I managed a solid eleven hours of sleep on Monday night. I woke up on Tuesday my body sore from spending too much time horizontally, but my head fantastically clear compared to my state of mind over the few days preceding that. I blame the full moon, I never sleep right for about a week and find myself wondering what the hell is wrong with me until I realise it's out lunar companion in the sky messing with my sleep pattern.

Lily having a duvet day

I didn't venture far yesterday. Only as far as the shops to pick up a few bits I needed to make butternut squash soup. That was after I had chased one of the cats around the house to give her a tablet. For the first few days I was able to stick the tablet in her mouth and wait for her to swallow it. She soon copped onto this and somehow developed an ability to hold onto the tablet until I let her go, after which she spat the tablet onto the floor by my feet and ran off. My next tactic was to wrap the tablet in some salami. his worked a treat until she realised what was going on, and ate the salami around the tablet and proceeded to bat the tablet around the kitchen floor until it ended up under the fridge out of reach to both human and feline paws. Currently I'm wrapping the tablets in ham. When she sniffs out this ruse, I'm at a loss. What next?

Soon-to-be soup

This weather is perfect for duvet days, lazy days, days spent on the sofa by the fire with a good book. I love cooking on days like this, too. The warmth in the kitchen wards off the rain, and cooking with no deadlines and no time limitations can be very therapeutic. It's proper me-time. Just me and my ingredients, hands in the mixing bowl, measuring ingredients, binding them together, feeding more than just hungry bellies. Yesterday it was meat loaf with hidden boiled eggs inside (I think I got that one from Nigella). Blueberry pie with custard for dessert. All gobbled up by the fire, under a blanket big enough for two. Bliss.

Blueberry pie

I haven't set foot outside today, still waiting for it to stop raining for long enough to put the bin down. The road outside looks more like a river right now, so I have no immediate plans to venture outside any time soon. I have a loaf of bread in the oven, the whole house smells beautiful. I'll make myself a cup of strawberry tea and curl up on the couch beside the cat and read another few chapters of The Fry Chronicles.

Happy, rainy days.

Lazy Days

I booked myself three days off this week. It has so far proved to have been a brilliant idea, even if I do say so myself. I found myself getting very annoyed at the fact that I seemed to spend one of my days off running errands, doing the shopping and generally being out of the house for the whole day. The other day off was spent firmly in the house, cleaning, washing, tidying up and such lark. Any time left over I try to catch up with friends and maybe get some me-time, but seeing as there still is only 24 hours in a day and I really do ideally need 8 hours sleep per night, it really is limiting my options.

I shared my first day off with Mr S. Few errands, bit of shopping, bit of cleaning. Our old neighbour had contacted me the day before to ask us to help her move her dog house from the old house to her new place. Apparently our old landlord had just flung the dog house over the wall to the side of the old house where Mr S and I used to live, despite her telling him she was coming back for it. Charming man. So I went up to help her move it, my little car is surprisingly spacious when the back seats are flattened. When I got home, after a tour of her new house, which is lovely, we just lounged. I tried out a new recipe for a pizza base which was a huge success. I got the recipe from one of my Twitter-friends only to realise that I'd had the same recipe in Jamie's Italy -book for a few years now, earmarked and everything. Nothing like a recommendation to get you moving, eh?

Yesterday I spent catching up with friends. Good old chats, lots of laughs, insane amounts of tea and coffee and plenty of biscuits and cake. My Finnish friend, Marjo is something short of a wizard in the kitchen. Mocha-squares they're called in Finland, I suppose the closest thing here would be a brownie, but these things are a lot lighter and more sponge-like in texture and topped with a chocolate-coffee icing. See, I'm drooling already. So so tasty!

So, my third day off is today and I am blissfully aware that on a normal working week I would be getting stuck into trying to explain to a German tourist, who doesn't speak any English, what a parsnip is. (Apparently, calling it a white carrot isn't informative enough) Yet here I am, in our office, in my comfiest (and by default, the ugliest) baggy tracksuit bottoms and a hoodie, sporting a rather fetching bedhead, sipping my second cup of coffee, trawling the internet for stuff and not caring how long it takes me.

Conveniently enough, it's raining outside so I'm not likely to feel the need to go out and rake the grass we finally got cut on Monday. Or go out for a walk. Or, indeed anything that requires getting out of the house. The wheelie bin is at the bottom of the driveway, I may stretch to going out a bringing it back up. But I'll wait for it to stop raining first.

I have a stack of magazines to catch up on, the last two issues of the National Geographic on the top of the pile. I'm still reading Jo Nesbo's The Redeemer, which is proving very good indeed and nicely filling the void left by Stieg Larssen's Millenium-trilogy. I'm doing two loads of laundry, and two only, washing the sheets (I love Clean Sheets Day). I also have a pile of DVDs to watch, I'm contemplating on either having a Harry Potter marathon, or a Bones marathon. But the important thing is, I don't have to do any of these things if I don't choose to. I could quite happily veg out on the couch, listen to the radio and pet the cats. How about that for a lazy day, huh?

Literally Speaking

I think I did post this on Twitter if nowhere else in English; I was reading Katherine Webb's book The Legacy. I did do a quick post in Finnish, but thought I'd ought to say a few words in English as well. So here goes:

It's bitterly cold winter in the English countryside. Beth and Erica Calcott have recently lost their grandmother Meredith, whose old manor house they now stand to inherit. On one condition; both women must move in to Storton Manor to live. Permanently. Neither one of the sisters has been back since their childhood despite spending many happy summers there. It all changed on that summer when Beth was twelve and Erica was eight. Their cousin Henry disappeared without a trace.

Since they stopped visiting their grandmother's house, they lost touch with their best friend, Dinny. Dinny came from a family on travellers who camped on the edge of the manor's vast lands despite Meredith, and Meredith's mother's, Caroline's open resentment towards them.

Up in the attic, sorting through Meredith's things Erica comes across an old photograph of Caroline holding a baby boy with motherly pride. The photo was taken before she married the girl's grandfather, Lord Henry Calcott. Who was the boy? Why did Caroline leave behind her high-society life in America and moved to England to marry a Lord? Why did she hate the travellers who lived next door to them, at the invitation of her own husband?

As Erica delves deeper into her grandmother's past, she starts to remember bits and pieces of that summer Henry went missing. The reappearance of the girl's friend Dinny only stirs things up even more. Why cannot Erica remember what happened to Henry? She feels as if she should. She knows it's something that affected Beth profoundly, she believes it is at the root of Beth's depression.

Covering romance, thriller, mystery and themes ranging from motherhood and the legacy we leave to the generations to come, and how, should we choose to, we can leave all of that behind and find out own way through life.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, hope you do too.

Book Worm

I love reading. Always have, and I strongly suspect that I always will. I’m not all that choosy about what I read, either. The back of a cereal packet will do me, in a pinch, or a leaflet out of a box of tampons. Really, I love reading.

I remember the first book I ever enjoyed reading. Reading myself, I mean, not a book that was read to me. My mother read to me a lot, she worked as a child minder at the time and she worked from our house, so there were other kids to entertain, too. I always got the best spot right beside her and got to turn the pages, too. But the very first book I took out from the library, brought home and read from cover to cover in one day was Matilda by Roald Dahl. I was so engrossed in it, I wanted to bring it to the dinner table, just in case the words dripped off the pages while I was eating and I’d miss the ending. I fell in love. And I wanted more.

Funnily enough, I didn’t read anything else by Roald Dahl. How I ended up reading Enid Blyton, I don’t remember but I thoroughly enjoyed every single one of her books. Under the influence of Famous Five, me and the boy next door, Sami, went around looking for secret passageways out of our houses and suspected every adult we didn’t know to be a smuggler out to get us. I had no idea what a boarding school was, either, there aren’t any in Finland, at least not to my knowledge, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to go to one. I even asked my parents to send me to one. I was promptly told it wasn’t an option.

My two best friends

There are few books I read over and over again. Matilda being one of them. Brian Hall’s Saskiad is on me permanent reading list, as is Pat Conroy’s Beach Music and Anne Rice’s Vampire Lestat. I have a bookcase jam packed with books I haven’t read yet. All kinds of books. I love the smell of the pages, the weight of a good book in my hand, and I love putting in my bookmark, leaving it to one side and then picking it up again like a good old friend called in for a catch up and a chat.

And while I’m sure Kindle is a fantastic idea and works for loads of people, it will never work for me. It makes me a little bit sad because I do love my gadgets, but  there is nothing in this world that beats the sound a book makes when you’re opening it for the first time. Of the book-y smell of the pages as your turning them.

Right now, I’m reading Victoria Hislop’s The Return which is turning out to be a very interesting read. I’ll let you know what I think when I’m finished, ok?