Heads up

Just to warn you all - I am taking our car in to the garage on Tuesday to have the snow tyres taken off.

Cue the blizzards.

I don't think I qualify as Scottish any more

We ate dinner last night in the dining room with the patio doors open to let in the sunshine. (This helpfully enabled the throwing of scraps of smoked salmon to the cat. He naturally assumed it was raining food. He approves of this development.) The boys and I then went out for a walk - without scarves and jackets - at 8pm. We needed neither umbrellas nor torches.

Today, I have washing hanging out on the line (well, whirlygig technically) and it is neither getting wetter than it was when it came out of the machine nor freezing rigid. It is blowing gently in a very slight WARM breeze. This is March. In Edinburgh.

You know we will pay for this later, don't you?

Much gratitude

Thank you all for so kindly participating in First Born's e-reader survey. I agree, there were many more options for responses that could have been provided, but (1) it's FB's survey, not mine and I know when to butt out, and (2) it is going to be challenging enough for this poor middle-aged wifie to assist in analysing the data as it is. More options = more headaches = more gin required and that is not an example I necessarily wish to set.

Seriously, thank you all very much. You are all lovely and ought to be allowed to laze around and eat chocolate all day every day. Speaking of which.....

It was Mothers' Day (Mother's Day?) on Sunday and, along with a cup of tea and some toasted fruit loaf (prepared and served as it should be prepared ie COLD) I received this


That right there is a bespoke box of Thornton's chocolates with a picture of The Corbies garden on the lid. A box of Alpini chocolates, to be precise. My favourite. Or, more accurately, mostly Alpini. I suspect Husband had a hand in the selection. He is rather fond of the Viennese Truffles. Can you tell?

Each layer comes pre-loaded with a chocolate specially placed for Husband to steal! It's a good job I'm fond of him.

So, between receiving my favourite chocolates, tea and cold toast in bed and a morning spent lazing around in the spring sunshine here (spot the Kindle poised and ready)
.....it was one of the nicer Sundays I have ever spent.

Also, you may notice our whisky barrels perched proudly on the pigsty roof. This is Husband's experiment to try to stop the local bunny population from munching our peas. He reckons if we plant them up there, the pesky varmints won't manage to get onto the roof and then into the barrels so we should in theory be able to manage a decent crop of peas this year. Whether he is hoping for whisky-infused peas, I am not sure. I'll keep you posted.

PS If you have any friends who wouldn't mind doing FB's survey, it will be up for about another day. I'm just saying. No pressure.

Begging letter

So, where was I? Oh yes, it was 2011 and I sort of didn't blog for a little while.....

Despite several very polite but insistent prods from Isabelle, I just haven't managed to get round to posting for quite some time. There has been stuff going on - Christmas and Hogmanay for example, were rather fun with the new year seen in in style in the village hall near our cottage in the Borders. The fireworks at midnight were provided courtesy of one of the locals who used to be in the Royal Artillery. What they lacked in size compared to the Edinburgh display, they made up for by virtually parting your hair as they whizzed (not very far) overhead.

First Born turned 14 and insists on continuing to grow. He is now almost as tall as I am. This is somewhat disconcerting. It won't be long before I have to stand on a stool to nag him.

We have also just gone through the trial by bureaucracy that is selecting his subject options for S3. Rather fortunately he has been given an exemption from the school's policy that all pupils must take one science but it took a while for us to be told this - a couple of weeks of us encouraging him that studying Biology would be fine and his difficulties with maths would not necessarily prevent him from managing it. He has decided to do Latin instead and we are quite relieved.

What else? Husband and I celebrated our 25th year together by depositing the boys with Granny and Grandad and scampering off to this place for a couple of days. It was blissful. I thoroughly recommend it. Any place that encourages you to check in from the depths of an enormous squashy sofa whilst drinking a welcoming glass of champagne with is fine by me. The weather could have been better but since we spent a frankly ridiculous amount of time on more squashy couches reading, drinking tea and eating smoked salmon sandwiches, we didn't really mind.

There must be more to talk about but I will need to have a think about what that is. In the meantime, despite having sinfully neglected you all for months, I am going to beg a favour. First Born is doing an economics project at school in terms of which he has to pick an economic-y question and then do some original research of his own in trying to answer it. He has decided to look at the impact of e-readers on traditional publishing and his original research is a survey of attitudes to e-readers and here is where you come in, o lovely, intelligent and worthy readers. If you wouldn't mind taking FB's wee survey, he would be very grateful. It is very, very short and should take less than a minute to complete. Click on the wee link to go. And while you are off doing that, I will try to get back into a more bloggy sort of a frame of mind.

Click here to take survey

Thank you!