Month: August 2015

My favourite books read in 2015 so far

Posted on by Pam

I read a lot, and I’m quite a fast reader normally, but this year has been so busy that I’ve not read anywhere near the normal amount,  but some of the books I’ve read this year have been amazing, and so I thought I’d share them!

I’m steering clear of ones that are in the middle of series, because that’s useless to someone who hasn’t read the series to date, and I know a lot of people are intimidated by the idea of reading a lot of books in a series, so let’s just skip those!

I’m part of the Sword and Laser bookclub, which reads one book a month, and it’s discussed on their podcast, and also on the forums on GoodReads.

This year, we’ve read the following books, which I’ve thought were brilliant!

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison – best described as court intrigue, and so well written!

City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett  – gods have been killed, and the country is trying to recover after various miracles no longer work.

Uprooted by Naomi Novik – the Dragon, Lord of the land, takes a girl every ten years to be his servant, but this time there’s a couple of changes.

Previously, Sword and Laser have read Ready Player One by Ernie Cline, but I was lent the book this year, and enjoyed it so much!  I’m a little reluctant to try Armada, Ernie Cline’s latest, as I’ve heard it’s not as good, but I might bite the bullet in time!

And on the same lines, Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman (of whom I’m a bit of a fangirl!) and Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal, which is Regency romance, but with a magical twist, and I shall be looking for more of her books!

I really enjoy the Freakonomics podcast, and their 3 books (Freakonomics, Superfreakonomics and Think Like a Freak)  have also been really fascinating, although you can read basically the transcript of a podcast episode in some of the chapters, so you have been warned!

Yes Please by Amy Poehler was an impulse pickup at the library, and was so good!  I’m now trying Parks and Recreation, because I want to keep her around somehow!  You need to read her book, and have youtube on standby to go and search for the various standup sketches! My favourites have to be the award ceremony hijinks though!   Beauty Pageant, George Cloony and of course Bono.

There’s still a lot of 2015 left, so I might still come across something that blows everything out of the water!  What’s yours been?

One of the many things I quote from

Posted on by Pam
I’m not hugely in to keeping up with webcomics, but I really enjoyed Sequential Art (yes, that is a link for the very first comic! Aren’t I good to you!) when I read it, and this strip is one that I often quote from, just because it strikes my funny bone!
Here’s the link to the page this comic is from!

Hope that brightens your day, because it always does mine!

My year in books so far

Posted on by Pam

I do love Goodreads – they make keeping track of what I’ve read before, and what I want to read so much easier than it used to be!

This is my username and picture, because I love(d! Nom!) that bird!

Whenever I go near a bookshop or library (usually after having smelt it out, according to some!) I am normally looking at my phone, and then at a book in my hand, working out where I am in a series, or if I’ve liked anything else by the author, or even what other people have thought of the book (anything with a very low star rating gets set gently back on the shelf!  Too many books, too little time!)

This is my current view when I look at my stats, and I do love the information that I can see, such as longest book, how many books read, and you can see what I’ve rated them!

Yes, I do rate a lot of books as being 4 stars…

And then I remember how many books are on my to read list…….

So if you see me in a book shop or library, remind me that I don’t need to find new books, just read the ones I want to read already!

I’m a bit of a cross stitch fan

Posted on by Pam

I think I was introduced to stitching by my Gran, in birthday and Christmas presents.  I still have most of the finished items languishing in a bag, because I can never be bothered to make them into the finished article, or display them.  There  is only 1 piece on permanent display in my house, and that’s because my Mum had it framed!

The kit came from a trip my parents and 2 sisters took to the US years ago.

It’s only been in the last five years that I’ve re-discovered stitching, and found that actually, it can be fun, and that I want to show off what I make!

I found Cross Stitcher magazine, and started making their free kits, and then went on to more ambitious projects.

This is one piece from Cross Stitcher magazine that now goes up every Christmas!
I just need to go back to the one of London, and re-do the phone box in blue!

The Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery was one of the first places I discovered that I actually wanted to buy everything from!  I signed up for their subscription packages that Christmas (2012, I believe!) after watching people having so much fun on facebook and instagram sewing the patterns, and then showing them off!

These were both released for people to stitch in late 2013, and yes, I am trying to fill the walls at Christmas time apparently!

I’ve liked making random bits for people, like Jen from Epbot and Cakewrecks when I sewed Princess Buttercup and Wesley from The Princess Bride, with the pattern from Wee Little Stitches on Etsy.

My works in progress would take up a much longer post, which I might do, just to shame myself into finishing something, and also as a reason to tidy up the mess that my stitching storage area is (no, really, I can’t show you a photo of that!)

But I will say that I love Felicity Hall’s Bird and Peony clutch and that I really really want to get one of Hannah Bass‘s maps – I want to do the light London one, and then each of the others, but I really feel I need to have visited first, before I can stitch them! Anyone else feel a lot of holidays coming on?

I’m looking forward to spending some more time stitching for this Autumn, especially as I’m visiting the Handmade Fair in September, and want to go to the Knitting and Stitching Show in October!

Hope this hasn’t been too boring, or that at least you enjoyed skimming the pictures!

The time I wanted to stop looking out of the kitchen window

Posted on by Pam
It all started innocently enough!
It was Christmas 2010, and it snowed, so Piete decided to make a snowman….

 Yes, our garden is mostly paving stones and concrete, which makes gathering snow pretty good, as it’s nice and even, and Piete is a determined man…..

Piete asked me what kind of snowman I wanted, and I couldn’t resist as it was near Christmas, and requested Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas!
Just a reminder of what he looks like, before we go on to the terrifying conclusion!
And so Piete built me what I had requested…..

 And this is how I saw the snowman, whenever I went into the kitchen… smiling at me with his creepy smile, and WATCHING ME!

‘Why yes, I would like a drink, please! A drink of your blood!‘
And then, finally, the nightmare was over, but our creepy snowman lasted a lot longer than I wanted him to!

Happily, there hasn’t been snow enough for a snowman since then, but I have a feeling that when we do next have a snowman, this one might re-incarnate!

The kitchen

Posted on by Pam

This is a post I found in my drafts (from 2010, need I say more!), and it really captured a time for me which I had completely forgotten about!  So I thought I’d publish it now….

As you’ll have noticed from the post below, we’ve recently moved, and what you might have noticed is that the kitchen has a hole in it, that looks suspiciously like a cooker shaped hole. And it is.

We were living off microwave meals (Innocent veg pots – yum!) until I realised that I could actually dig out the slow cooker, and cook in a very slow manner. So that’s what we’ve been doing, along with researching how to cook rice, and boil potatoes, in a microwave!

We are going to buy a cooker, but we’re taking the opportunity to work out what we want in a cooker – something that’s going to cook good food, that I’m not going to get too frustrated with (I can handle electric hobs, but it doesn’t mean that I like them!), and that’s going to be a good investment, and of course, isn’t going to cost the Earth to run! And in the meantime, we’ve bought a combination microwave – so we’ll actually have something that I can use as an oven, and that might actually work for me every time, unlike the microwave, which has always shown me that it belongs to Piete by not cooking things for me. The classic example was a couple of weeks ago, when I made 2 lots of hot chocolate – 1 for Piete, and 1 for me. Guess which one was hot, and which was cold! And I didn’t do anything different.

I’m looking forward to the chance to bake things again – I’ve bought some cookie cutters recently, and it’ll be great to have the chance to use them!

Inspiration

Posted on by Pam

I just finished reading one of my friend’s new blog  , and thought, yes, I want to do something like that as well… so here I am, after 5 years… you can ignore the previous posts, I promise!

At the moment, I’m working my notice, and waiting for 11th September, when I’m going to dye my hair blue (here’s the inspiration…. Kat from RocknRoll Bride)

And then… we’ll see what happens!