Happy New Year! Gott Nytt År!

Happy New Year, hope 2014 is a good year for all.
Gott Nytt År till er allihopa!

a  bobbin full of blue, let's hope 2014 has lots of productive creativity for all of us!

almost on hols, just 3 school days left!

I am almost there, just 3 school days left to holidays on Friday. Tests and craft to finish before that, but hey, it'll happen.
Then just got to make Christmas happen here at home too.
My favouritest thing (I know that's not really a word) about Christmas are those wonderful quiet days in the middle, between Christmas Day and New Year's Day, when things quieten down again and if you listen, you can almost hear the earth turn; if you go for a walk, you can certainly hear it breathe....
On these days, I love to go for a walk, do one or two small jobs at home and then get out my knitting or spinning. I now have two wheels as well as a selection of spindles,  and I aim to get plenty use out of them on my time off.
I hope to have a few photos to show you all, I just need to take the photos in natural light and I didn't manag e that today.
To answer kristieinbc's question, yes I have been spinning. I have some chocolate alpaca spun up from the summer and am about to ply some singles spun from Jacob's fleece; both the alpaca fiber and the Jacob's fleece came from 2 animals living at a local open farm, where they also have a llama and some Soay sheep.
I have spun some yummy Ashford merino/silk blend and I have some much tweedier looking yarn I spun from fleece I got at Kerry Woollen Mills about 3 years ago.
I am not getting time to knit much, however I do have a few pieces in progress (Works in Progress = WIPs) and some crochet, lots of crocheted cotton skinny scarves FOs (Finished Objects), it was just very easy to take a ball of cotton yarn and a crochet hook with me on planes, to playgrounds, and to dentists/orthodontists waiting rooms and other appointments.
I am gone into a bit of  a Textile History phase now, reading books, articles and websites about textile history in general, and Spinning and Weaving in Ireland in particular. It is so interesting. I will tell ye about the books I have read in a blog post all on its own soon.
I wish I had the company of some of you knitting ladies in my class at times, as I try to get 30 children knitting for possibly the first time in their lives!
talk soon! Stay warm, stay well!

a walk

A walk on a windy but dry Sunday morning.

 Some rosehips.

I went for a walk with husband.

 Stripy bark. (now was it beech or ash, gotta look again at it next walk, think it was beech, actually)

Forty shades of green. An old piece of galvanised roofing sheeting, being used to block a gap in the hedge, in an effort to keep the lifestock in.

  

Then I went for a shorter walk, with son.

It was very windy here yesterday, and wet, it rained all day. I stayed home most of the day and put up a small wardrobe for dear son's clothes, now I can get back the laundry basket his jackets and some other clothes were being 'stored' in.

Thankfully, today dawned windy, but dry. Up and out to the washing line with me. Nothing like getting 4 baskets of clothes out and drying! In December! Hooray!
Needless to say the rain returned later in the day, about 1 or 2pm, but gladly by then the clothes were almost all dry. And with hubby's help, I got them all in in time, just before the rain began.

Now to get down to the stuff that just has to get done this coming week, maybe a Christmas test for the pupils in school and definitely Christmas Art and Craft.
Gulp!

This 8-headed red beauty and those flags

So, thanks to all of you who have visited my pages in the last few days and especially to those who have left comments, I do like to get a few comments! Warms the cockles of the heart, so it does....!

I wanted to show you a picture of this wonderful Amaryllis, aka Hippeastrum, which I bought in Lidl, a few weeks ago, and which has bloomed with no less than 8 flowers so far! 5 on the taller stem and 3 on the lower and there is a 3rd stem in there too, with a bud which I noticed today. When I got the Amaryllis, it just had the stems, no flowers at all.

It sits on the south-facing windowsill beside my teacher's table and gets lots of light and heat. Very impressive beauty, even if I do say so myself.

I tried to go back and edit in the photo of the flags into the last post, but blogger was having none of it, not happening, no way...
so here is a shot of the flags, at about 9.10am two days ago, I took the shot from inside my classroom, you can see the reflection of the lights in the shot. The sun is coming up, sunrise was about 8.36am, so although it looks like it is just coming up, the sun has actually been up for about 35mins already.

This is the view from my classroom every day.  I can see the Galtee Mountains off in the distance behind the houses, and on cold days, we see the snow on the mountains. Ireland is mostly quite mild, so that may be the only snow we see in winter.  Before the housing estate was built, that was farmland across the road, with just one cottage. There were white and black Friesian cows grazing there most days. I miss those cows and the uninterrupted view across the fields to the mountains. I like simple things. Like clouds and cows and peace and quiet and knitting and spinning.

Easterly winds, Tá sé gaofar inniu.

My classroom has two flagpoles just outside it, with our Active Schools Flag on one and our Green Schools Flag on the other. I think the flags are perfect for watching the wind and weather. Weather is one of my very dear  interests! The weather forecasts are about the only television programs I watch.
Most mornings in school, as I greet my children, we talk about the day, date and month, and the weather. We look out at the flags and we say whether it is windy, very windy or not windy at all. We usually do this in Irish (Gaelic/Gaeilge). The phrases we use are:
It is windy today =  Tá sé gaofar inniu. (Thaw shea gway-far inn-ue).
It is not windy today =  Níl sé gaofar inniu. (Neel shea gway-far inn-ue). 
It's a little bit windy = Tá sé beagáinín gaofar. (Thaw shea b'yug-awneen gway-far).
It is stormy = Tá sé stoirmiúil. (Thaw shea stirm-ool).

I love looking at those flags. Usually the wind is from the South-West, which would be our prevailing wind, bringing moist, relatively warm air from the Atlantic Ocean. Imagine my surprise today to see the flags then flying in an easterly wind! So much so that I remarked on it to the children.
What do you think the children will remember from my class and about me? Probably that I knitted a lot, that I could teach Maths and History all day if allowed and that I talked a lot about wind and weather and those flags!

At home, feeding of wild birds has resumed. Photos on the way, I found a cable for the phone to talk to the pc, Yippee!

 Yes, the cable works! So here, hiding behind a potted palm , is the Good Man himself, all dressed in red, he is on his way , I believe, in the next 2 weeks or so.

mild winter weather

We are having very mild winter weather at the moment. It is about 5 degrees warmer than is usual for this time of year, about 12 to 15 degrees centigrade in the day. I hung out 4 baskets of clothes yesterday and they were mostly dry in the afternoon. Quite amazing really.
(I have decided that the only way to have time to blog is to try to write short blog posts more frequently, rather than long rambling posts that take too long to write and edit. Bear with me!)
It is hard to believe that there are only 2 school weeks left till Christmas holidays. It really doesn't feel like Christmas is approaching, but then, maybe that's because I'm a grown-up now and not a child!

2:a Advent

It is the 2nd Sunday in Advent,  the 8th December.
We put our Christmas tree up, I was going to get no peace from my son until I did that!

Deireadh Fómhair, October

And so we are in October, the month known in Irish as 'End of Autumn' ie, Deireadh Fómhair.
Today we had a Referendum in our country, and I had an extra day off, as my place of work, like many primary schools, was being used as a polling station. My son was also off and we did a little bit of shopping in the morning as well as doing some errands that had to be done on a weekday, and then we went home, and son had his friend over for a few hours.
The rain stopped, the sun came out  and it was a glorious afternoon, only getting a bit chilly later as afternoon became evening.
Today I bought my daughter some safety essentials for her car, namely, a good wheel wrench and a high visibility vest. I plan to buy her a full emergency kit next weekend.
I have become very interested in learning more about the History of Spinning in Ireland, and am reading up on this topic wherever I find articles on it. I have my eye on a particular book on sale on eBay, we'll see if I 'win' it or not. More anon....
My wheels give me great joy. I am ever so grateful to have had the bit of money to buy them and to be able to keep them. Now my eyes light up when I see sheep locally. There are about 6 sheep in a field only a mile away. I am thinking of leaving a note in the letterbox of the adjoining house to ask about their fleece, when they get shorn. And I discovered another sheep grazing a lawn of a house 2 miles in the other direction. Needless to say there will not be enough space to store the fleece, nor time to spin it all up. I have plenty to be getting on with as it is.
I am thinking too of selling off my knitting books, and just keeping my spinning ones. After all, there are knitting patterns available for free on Ravelry and Knitty and Drops sites. But information on spinning is not as easy to find.
I got a pair of free tickets to go see Judy Collins (74 yrs young!!!!!) in Dromoland Castle last Sunday night. Darling Husband has been playing me her songs for years and so when I saw the ad in the local free newspaper for free tickets to her concert, I simply had to send off my email and hope for the best. I got the tickets and off we went. The concert was small and intimate. She was great, full of energy, and that amazing distinctive voice. The concert was being filmed possibly for televison in USA. It was just a great treat to get to see Judy Collins! Hubby was happy too.
Tomorrow, a trip to south County Cork awaits, for a christening of a new niece, and on Sunday we will celebrate my mother's 70th with a meal out.
I need to find the cable that connects my phone to the computer, my other camera got broken recently and I cannot put up photos without the little grey Nokia cable to connect phone to laptop....
Life continues, work, school, homework, some housework, meeting up with family and friends, watching the seasons change, children growing......
All is well here, thankfully.
Apologies for those would like some photos, I am aware that my blog needs more visuals, and less text maybe.....
I hope to remedy that soon enough.
Enjoy this Autumn weekend (Spring if you're in Australia!)
regards
liz

another week done, Autumn on the way

And so another week is down. That makes it two weeks back at school.
This is the week that my eldest daughter with my help bought herself her own first little car. She passed her driving test the previous week.
She will now drive herself to school and home again, and to her part-time job  and home again and I might actually have less driving to do as a result.
Two weeks done at school and plenty to be getting on with, copybooks (exercise books) to be corrected, and children to be reminded of the importance of Full Stops and Capital Letters!
The weather was gorgeous yesterday, it was sunny and warm, however today the weather turned, we woke up to rain (as forecast) and wind. The rain actually died down after a few hours and my Darling Husband hung out some clothes and they dried in the breeze. I was at that point having a nap as I was tired from demonstrating Spinning on my spinning wheel and spindle at the Hunt Museum in Limerick yesterday from 10am to 4pm, I do love to demo and to meet people and answer questions but i didn't realise how tired I already was from the week of work.
All fine now at least.
The swallows were gathered yesterday morning on the telephone wires when I was packing my wheel into the car, before 9am. There is no sign of the swallows today, I wonder if they flew away yesterday? It wouldn;t surprise me, there is a definite change in the air.
What does this week hold? well, some training sessions for my kids, soccer football , camogie etc, plenty school work and house work, not too many sressful things to do, i think, and hopefully I will get some time to take a walk, go for a swim, do yoga and sit and spin too...
Hope you all have a good week!

holidays over, new school year.

So another Summer is over, and another new school year has started.  I hope you have all had a good summer.
I went back to school about a week ago, on the 2nd of September.
It was a bit of a scramble in the end, getting everything and everyone ready for the return to school; no matter how many lists you have and how much stuff you buy, there is always some little item or two that Simply has to be bought Now, the day before school starts. But not to worry, in the end we all went back, I even managed to tidy my classrom and in particular the clutter corner in there, before we went back.
Now we are back our first full week, and all I can think about is Bed!  Getting enough sleep is going to be very important for all of us this academic year.
The weather, which had been very good overall, has now changed to Autumnal to say the least. I for one love the feeling of the chill in the still clear air in the mornings, the chill again in the evenings when the sun begins to go down, and the wonderful sunsets...
I will go now as it is sooooo late, I hope to get back in here again more frequently and write a few lines more often, let's see how I get on with that!
Take care all out there!
l

chillin time.....

so yes I am still on my hols, and enjoying it very much.

Quick summary so far:
June 28th: last day at school.

July 2nd/3rd: Heatwave started in Ireland!

July 5th, 6th, 7th: Feile Camogie competition in County Limerick, my 13 yr old played a few camogie matches in sweltering heat!

July 8th, final day of packing the suitcases, temps of up to 30degrees C all day, couldn't sleep much that night, humid and warm night,

July 9th: alarm clock rang at 4am, all up and out, on the road to Dublin Airport, heading for our flight to Sweden. Flew via Copenhagen, landed Göteborg, about 6pm. Finished off the day with a stroll down Andra Långgatan and a pizza from Pizza Rimini on Plantagegatan.

July 10th to July 22nd: Göteborg, and Karlstad. Bada  utomhus Örsholmens Tjärn (6 ggr minst), bada, bada, bada i Sundstabadet, bada, calzone, bada Getingberget, såg Stamfrändsmonumentet utanför Sunne igen (första gång var i oktober 1990 med Mikael och hans far H), var en heldag på Sunne Vattenland, åt gott hos Ölmes Prästgård ( Farmor fyllde 90), Siobhan såg en snok i vattnet, Sean trillade i, åkte på grusväg hem till Karlstad, cykla, virka, spinna med ny turkisk slända, såg elefanter säl och sjölejon (circus in town), drack Earl Grey te, Jag Körde Hem från Sunne! kusiner V och M, farbror J, Farmor I, BBQ med massor av Mikaels kompisar, cykla, bada, hitta nya lekplatser, åt gott, bada..... (basically translates as lots of swimming in lakes, eating Calzone and other pizzas, a snake in the water, elephants in the park, cycling, crochet, spinning on my new Turkish spindle and a bit of driving, on the wrong side of the road!)

July 23rd: alarm clock 4 am, på Landvetter Airport hotell this time, breakfast buffet (best ever!!) at 4,30 am, then flew out at 7am to Copenhagen, then Dublin, and drove home to Limerick and our own little house.
sigh......

July 24th: Daughter's birthday, but wet damp dull day, and all that unpacking and sorting to do...

July 25th: party for dear daughter, sun shone and lots of cousins and friends came, all had a smashing day!

July 27th: drove to Kilkenny Nowlan Park for a concert: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN! Woo Hoo!!!! Brilliant night, over 3 hrs of non-stop music! Smashing! drove home, got home 1.45am.

July 28th: spent almost 2 hours happily spinning and meeting people in Zest cafe in limerick city, at the Limerick Knitting and Spinning and Craft group

July 29th, beginning to get down to the nitty gritty of doing the stuff that has to be done before school...

Hope the summer is treating you all well wherever you are,
hope it's not too hot, or too wet,
Me, I like it changeable, I do not like searing heat. Love watching the clouds roll in and then roll away after the showers.
Ha det så bra under sommaren!
Have a good summer

On my holliers!

Yes, I am On My Holidays!!
Finally,  I've a chance to rest a bit, walk a bit, tidy up the house and get sorted for our trip to Sweden in about a week's time.
I am also trying to do a bit of spinning every day, and hopefully will get some knitting/crochet done in Sweden.
The weather is not very summery, but I don't mind for now, I prefer it when the weather isn't extreme. My idea of extreme is anything above 22 degrees Centigrade!
Hope people out there are enjoying your summer, wherever you are, or your Winter if you are Down Under in Australia!

almost there!

second last day in school today,
holidays tomorrow! Yippee!!!
sports day and raising of Green Flag yesterday, hurray!
roll on Friday afternoon!

displacement activities

is that what it's called when you do not do the task that you really need to do, the one that you have to do for work, the one with the looming deadline, and instead choose to do things like write in your blog, or search online for spinning wheels for sale in Munster Ireland (found one for sale in Kerry) or even in Karlstad Sweden, cause really I Cannot Possibly Go On Holidays Without A Wheel......
meanwhile the piles of reports and tests remain by my side, yes, well I'll be back at them very shortly now
and as for my 2 beautiful spinning wheels, well, I dream of spinning, and I croon to my wheels as I walk past them 'Soon, my lovelies, soon, I will be free to sit and spin.....'
Just another 2 weeks, less than that now as it is now only 9 school days left.....

Lovely June Sunday morning

It's a lovely Sunday morning in June, what I mean is it's dry, not raining and a bit overcast, but the forecast os good. (Can you tell that my favourite TV programme of all time is the Weather Forecast? and that I love that there's a new one with new pictures every evening?)
I am at my computer, obvs, trying to download a thing called Nitro reader, free pdf reader and creator, and thankfully I have now succeeded. I needed this Nitro in order to wr ite my end-of-year school report cards,  an onerous task which will probably take most of today and tomorrow, bleurgh...., but it has to be done.
I had a lovely walk/run at 8am this morning, (I am now trying to lose a bit of the baby fat, the child is 7 years old after all, it'd be time for me, eh?) Although Run is a bit of an exaggeration, Accelerated Shuffle might be a more apt description. Still, I'm up and out and about, and that has to be a good thing.
Father's day today, gotta make sure two dads in this world are happy, my own and my childrens' dad!
 Hope ye have a good day today!

I'm back!

I'm back in business again, writing a bit in here and reading your blogs!
Holidays soon, thankfully.
My eldest daughter turned 18, amazing!
We had a glorious week of summer weather in Ireland, but the Weather Gods are making up for that now by pelting us with rain, like the rain we usually get, plus the backlog of rain we didn't get last week as well as penalties and fines for daring to not get rain for a week.
Still, I am ok with the rain, it softens the earth, nourishes and waters the fields and grass and plants and gives life.
I was at a Graduation Ceremony yesterday in Limerick, my brother became a medical doctor, Well Done J!

I have 2 weeks left of school until the holidays Yippee

long long time no speak

Well, people,
how are you all out there in bloggland....
It has been a very long time since last I wrote in this little blog, for this I apologise.
For a little while there, I even thought of erasing and deleting the blogg, but then when it came to the crunch I couldn't do it, at least not yet.

I believe that for a blog to be enjoyable and interesting the writer probably should have a good camera and the time to sit and upload the photos and actually get them on the blog; as well as which the writer ought to have the time to write something on the blog every so often (at least weekly).
Unfortunately I do not have these things: husband has an excellent camera, but I have not got the time to get to grips with it, nor do I have the time to put up the photos I do take with my little mobile phone camera nor time for writing as frequently as I would like.
So should I close up the blog or not? Well I am not deciding on that yet.
Life has just been busy around here with the usual, work, children and husband, the house, and more work.
Here's a quick summary:
March 2013: St Patrick's Day and dear daughter's 16th birthday.
April 2013: Easter and holidays and dear son's 7th birthday. 2 German students came and stayed for a week in our house, as part of an exchange programme organised by my daughters' school.
May 2013: 4 Swedes came and visited, and my Swede showed them around County Clare and Adare and Limerick etc.
Husband's birthday this week. Cake at the weekend to celebrate maybe?

Some spinning gets done, some walking, some photos get taken of clouds, wild flowers, wool and spinning wheels, but of course they remain safe and sound in the mobile phone.
For now I will continue to be a blogger, intermittently so.
I can assure you all that I love to read the updates on all my followed blogs as often as I can.I must say it has been lovely to read how life is for different women around the world, via these amazing things called blogs.
Good Luck to you all in your endeavours for the rest of the week and the weekend,
I hope to be back soon again
E

Happy St Patrick's Day!

Hope you all had a good St Patrick's Day!
I had a peaceful day, just me and one child left at home, while the others were away, either working or staying over at the cousins or gone to see a parade with their dad!
So I got out my spinning wheel and plied the 2 bobbins of dark brown singles I finished spinning a few days ago.
Tomorrow I hope to start a new spinning project, maybe a blue or a red or, or, or.....
so many choices, so many colours and types of fleece, ..... sigh....
Apologies for being away so long, since I got the new laptop and the  new internet wifi router, my laptop has been appropriated by the offspring and it becomes difficult to wrestle it off them.....
I am here, nevertheless, working away, and marking my copies and trying to spin, knit and crochet a bit as well as work and walk and relax.
Last week I gave a spinning demo at the local Expo, I took my 2 wheels.
Spring is definitely here, daffodils are out and some primroses too. It is cold, colder than normal for this time of year, so we are still well wrapped up in winter woolies.
This weekend, we ahve a long weekend, tomorrow Monday is a Public Holiday, (for St Patrick's Day). So this week is only a 4 day week. Then on Friday, 22nd March. we get our school Easter holidays, woop woop!!
2 weeks off, yummy.
Hope ye have had a good weekend so far and enjoy the week!
L

Sunday night, Söndag kväll

Söndag kväll, jobbet imorgon.
Få se hur många av min familj lyckas med att ta sig till jobb/skolan imorgon, vi är förkylda allihopa.

Påskliljor har jag sett, men inte har jag lyckats med att plåta dem, de växer alldeles intill en farlig krok i vägen, och där vill inte jag parkera bilen.

Snödroppar håller på att blomma utanför min fars mosters hus, dessa snödroppar har jag tittat på i hela mitt liv, mer än 45 år, och de fanns innan jag föddes,skulle jag påstå, fantastiskt eller hur, att kunna komma tillbaks till samma ställe varje vår och få se de samma växter slå ut varje januari.

Det kanske kommer snö ikväll, fuktig luft rullar in från Atlanten medan det kommer väldigt kall luft från Europa ikväll över Irland, det kommer säkert att bli nederbörd, om det nu blir snö vet jag inte än, men det ser så ut.
Hoppas bara att det går att köra fram imorgon, inte har vi dubbdäck inte....
Ha det så bra allihopa under veckan,
Stay well and warm!


It's Sunday night, work again tomorrow.
I'm not sure how many of my family will manage to get to work / school tomorrow, we all have colds.

I was telling you that I had seen daffodils by the side of the road on my way to work, but I have not managed to photograph them, they grow right next to a dangerous turn in the road, and  I do not want to park the car there. These particular daffodils are very, very early, they are the earliest I have ever seen. The rest of the daffodils are just beginning to show spears and a few buds, but no flowers yet.

Snowdrops are just coming into flower outside my father's aunt's house. I remember these snowdrops from when I was a child, more than 45 years ago. I am sure they were there before I was born. It's amazing isn't it, to be able to go  back to the same place each Spring and see the same plants bloom every January.

Maybe it will snow tonight, there's a Low Pressure with moist air rolling in from the Atlantic Ocean while a band of  very cold air from Europe is coming in  over Ireland from the east tonight, there's sure to be precipitation, I'm just not sure if there will be snow or not, but it looks that way.

Just hope that I can get out and drive tomorrow morning, no studded winter tyres here, although apparently they are available, just that there is no law obliging us to have them on our cars.

Have a good week everyone,Stay well and stay warm!
liz

Photos Christmas 2012 and New Year 2013

This very friendly donkey was at the Live Crib in the local village, along with some ewes and lambs and a cow and calf.

Merino fleece from a New Zealand sheep,
Horrieta, a hermit sheep, she stayed up in the hills and avoided being shorn for 7 years!

Christmas dinner, turkey and ham and stuffing, sprouts, etc,  with all the trimmings, yum...

A mild green Christmas, I do love the shapes of the beech trees across the road. The poet Gerald Manley Hopkins used to speak of the Inscape of the tree.

Finished spool of 2 ply handspun spun from a blend of fibers, received from a Raveller on Spin-Cycle, so soft...

same as previous, only this time I put all the green/yellow fibers together before spinning

water on the road, near us, took ten days for the men to come out and clear it up

singles of Horrietta's wool, ready for plying

Horrieta's fleece spun up, can't remember if this is the single and can't quite see if it's the plied finished handspun

Ashford spinning wheel,  Elizabeth

Primroses blooming in the ditch, 3rd January 2013!













I love detangling, this lace weight tangle was given to me and it took me over 5 hours to detangle.... phew...

nearly Friday!

 It's Thursday night, best part of the weekend, I think, coz I am anticipating the weekend, tomorrow is just one day to get through and then I've 2 days off. Phew, I made it this far.......!
This week:
1. not bad being back at work, plenty to do, but at least there's routine back in the house and children aren't up all night and in bed all day (slight exaggeration)

2. nice to be back at work when the other activities haven't started yet, ie driving to matches, training sessions, evening classes,yoga and trying to keep food in the house. This week was quite restful, once I got home from work, I was free just to take it easy. (Next week, all the activities start again, batten down the hatches and ride the storm.....)

3. Sat one evening this week and watched and listened to a wonderful dvd: Fleetwood Mac live in concert, from about 1996, in The Dance, brilliant from first note to last. (Reminder to self: get Husbeast to put the corresponding CD of the concert onto my MP3 player so I can play this in the car on way to work/training/classes, cf point 2 above). Seriously, how can anyone survive without knowing and loving the first bars of Gold Dust Woman, or the build-up of Tusk, or the lyrics of Landslide...

4. Trying desperately (exagggeration) to find an Internet provider that will meet our needs and provide mobile broadband with wireless router which accepts 4 or 5 devices, with good coverage and large amount of allowance, ( 30GB per month or more), for a reasonable price. The current provider is not able to guarantee the coverage in our location. We are 'between masts'. Search continues, I think I may almost have a provider, gotta send a few emails to check.

5. Spring is coming/here, there are a few early daffodils already in bloom since before New Year, not at my house, but outside a house I pass most days. I saw primroses in bloom, a few early ones, last week, on a roadside ditch. The prmroses are not in a garden, not planted, nor cultivated, just wild. Very early for them, I think. Gotta go check if there are snowdrops outside my great-aunt's house as usual.

6. Books: From the library: 1. Alan Sillitoe, A Gadfly in Russia, loving it.
         2. Wildflowers of Ireland, a Personal record, Zoe Devlin, love that too, (possibly shoulda studied Botany, back in the day...)
        3. Yarn Harlot: 2 of her books, read one, very enjoyable; got the other one this evening at library, should be good too;

waiting on bedside table to be read:
1. Eat Pray Love,
 2. Moranthology and
3. assorted knitting and crochet books.

7. My Ashford Spinning wheel, she spins like a dream, so light on take-up, such even yarn, love it! I  took it to  Limerick Stitch and Bitch in Zest Cafe last Sunday. She stops traffic, my wheel, and I just love sitting spinning and then talking to people about what I am doing. I'll talk to anybody about spinning!

8. Weekend ahead - some spinning for certain. Match on Saturday, as well as a training session I'd say, and copies to mark, and a house to tidy and clean, and a walk to be had!

One more lie-in, then it starts all over again.

So 2013 is here and tonight is the 5th of January, already, can you believe it!
There is only one more lie-in tomorrow morning before we all go back to school and work on Monday 7th, and so tomorrow is to be treasured. (Husband has been back at work since last Wednesday, poor man, struggling to work in the morning while we all lie on and sleep till 10am!)
We have taken down the Christmas decorations, my eldest daughter did that yesterday with the help of young son. We could probably have left the decorations up until tomorrow afternoon, as tomorrow is the end of Christmas in Ireland, it is the Epiphany tomorrow. But I love to clear the stuff out of the living room and get a few days of living in clear space without trees and lights etc before I go back to work.
I wanted to add photos to this blog, but I haven't succeeded since I changed to the new Blogger layout, this is frustrating me a little bit, as I really enjoy looking at other people's photos in their blogs. I feel that my blog has too many words at present and not enough pictures. I will have to give the photo-loading instructions another go, maybe I will get it the next time. Although I don't think I can't try it tonight, as there are daughters waiting for their turn on the laptop, my laptop, as I remind them.
Today I saw for the first time this year  some new cars registered this year. In Ireland you know what year cars are registered by the first numbers in their reigstration plate. Last year cars had 12 as their first digits. This year there's a slight change, it will be 131 for cars registered in first 6 months of 2013 and then 132 for cars in second half of 2013. Rumour has it that this is to avoid a slump in car sales, which might have happened if superstitious people refused to buy a car with 13 in the reg.
Today I saw this reg: 131 D 1331. D stands for Dublin. That's an impressive number plate!
Wishing you all the best for the new year!