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!