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!

Back to normal. Ish.

Things are slowly returning to normal here at Schloss Loth. Last week was a bit weird, what with Husband's sudden and unexpected flirtation with the NHS in all its forms and Second Born being away from home all week on a school trip to London. SB is home again and seems to have had a great time. So good that it was minutes, MINUTES after getting off the bus before he started bickering with FB.

Given the itinerary for the trip, I am surprised SB didn't sleep round the clock on his return. The group left by train on Monday morning and were back in Edinburgh by 4pm on Friday. In between they managed to cover the Science Museum, a tour of London by World War II amphibious landing vehicle (it drives on the streets and then drives into the Thames), the Tower of London, backstage at The Globe Theatre, the Tate Modern, Houses of Parliament, Imperial War Museum, a trip on the London Eye and Madame Tussaud's. Oh, and a visit to the West End production of "The Wizard of Oz". I kind of wish I had been allowed to go too, to be honest.

The weekend was spent lazing around and recharging various batteries. Second Born did manage to disconnect himself from the XBox and laptop long enough to make soup for us all. Carrot and coriander, and very nice it was too. He even borrowed my favourite pinny for the occasion. Here he is in all his chef-y glory.
I like to wear that pinny while drinking tea from my Tim Horton's mug, for I am strange that way.

And now it is Monday. Husband is back at work, both children are back at school and the cat is still a bit confused by finding all the humans back interfering with his choice of snoozing spot. So no change there.

Well, THAT was fun

This weekend started well and sort of went off the rails slightly towards the end. We spent Saturday and the first half of Sunday at the Corbies with a friend of First Born's in tow. We lazed around a lot and I took the boys swimming in the afternoon - it was a bit too windy to do anything outdoors that didn't involve simply grabbing onto something solid and holding on tight and if I borrow someone else's child for the weekend, I usually want to make sure I can hand them back safely again at the end. Also, going swimming meant a brief interruption in the non-stop stream of chat between FB and his pal. Do you know how long two 13 year old boys can spend doing nothing but trading insults? ("Mole snogger." "Bin licker." "Toenail fancier" etc, etc) Hours. Hours and hours and hours. Long enough to make your ears bleed.

Anyway, we came home on Sunday early enough to get Second Born packed for a school trip to London which required him to be deposited at Waverley Station at 7am on Monday morning. All was going well until Husband's cold/cough/chest infection which he had been carefully nurturing for some days decided to stage a takeover bid. And this resulted in Husband and I spending the hours between 8.30pm on Sunday and 3:30am on Monday in the delightful surroundings of Edinburgh Royal Infirmary A&E department.

That period of time was interesting: the clientele changed over the hours from kids with breathing difficulties and University hockey teams bringing in their pal with a broken ankle to weepy/agressive individuals either stagering around clutching their paper mache vomit bowls or passed out cold on trolleys to sleep it off.

Husband and I spent a long time - a LONG time - sitting around waiting to be seen and this gave us the opportunity to chat about all sorts of important things. Like how your children never tell you anything when you ask them what happened at school today. According to our kids, nothing happens at school. Ever. We make them get out of bed, dress them in stupid uniforms and then drop them in front of a building where they sit for 6 hours doing absolutely nothing before we let them come home again.

As a result, Husband and I reckon there is a gap in the market for an add-on to all the Xbox and online games out there: there should be a parental lock on all such games which, when the child tries to log on, requires said child to provide full details of three interesting things that happened at school today. The system then e-mails or texts this to the parent for approval. If the parent is happy with the information provided, he or she texts back an authorisation code and the game is unlocked. If not, no "Minecraft" access for your poor offspring. (If you don't know what Minecraft is, then you should be happy about that. Clearly you do not share your house with teen or pre-teen boys.)

Fortunately after a multitude of tests, Husband was allowed to come home with a shedload of medication to fight the alien life-form trying to colonise his lungs and we got to bed about 4am. I was up again at 6am to make sure that Second Born was successfully packed off to London for the week and First Born was dropped off at school. And then I came home and climbed back into bed for a few hours.

And that is what I did with my St Andrew's day public holiday. Not that much worse than spending it in Ikea really.

What I did on my holidays

I have received a perfectly polite and well-mannered, but nonetheless firm, slap on the wrist from Isabelle for not posting. And she is quite correct (she used to teach, you know. She is always correct.) As I said to her in my mumbled apology, the muse has been somewhat absent of late but that is no excuse for spending far too much time on Facebook and not enough time churning out deathless prose. Or something like that. Tonight I find myself alone in the living room (oh the luxury!) as Husband is pottering in his music room, First Born has gone to bed nursing a cough (which could well be The Typhus, such is his air of resigned suffering) and Second Born is doing some work on his recent maths challenge problems. I do not understand the questions in said challenge, so am of limited use in providing any solutions. I therefore have no excuse not to sit down and blog. And here I am.

I seem to remember having promised you an update on the doings of Clan Loth over the past few weeks and, given the passage of time, this will have to be in the form of bullet points.

• We spent the half term holiday at the Corbies. And it was great fun. We went to Holy Island for the day and went to York on a different day (and should have been awarded some sort of Museum Endurance Medal for managing to cram the National Railway Museum, York Minster and two Jorvik exhibitions into one day)
  
• With the aid of Sister-in-law we systematically stripped the surrounding countryside of elderberries. We collected bags and bags and bags of them. Fortunately the weather was kind and we were able to sit outside for the fiddly task of getting the wee berries off the twigs and into bowls (the easiest way is to use a fork and sort of tease them off) Doing this outside is advisable as the berries are small, round and prone to escaping. And when squished, they release deep red juice which is very difficult to shift once it has stained its surroundings. The family production line resulted in a bumper crop of berries which I then spent some hours converting into this.
• Second Born went to school dressed as Winston Churchill - their year was having a VE day celebration as part of their topic of The Home Front in WWII. I wish I had a photo of that for you, but sadly I don't.
  
• Last weekend we were back down at the Corbies, this time with my mum and dad in tow. We had a wonderfully laid back Saturday, including a wander around the town of Eyemouth (FB was delighted: there is a good ice-cream shop there). We climbed up onto the Coastal Path from where the views were lovely in the unseasonal sunshine
• We ended up walking around the little harbour where this little pub is located - the name just tickled me for some reason.
• And we also spotted this on one of the fishing boats in the harbour: Makes one wonder how they might spell "fish"!
  

And now I must go and load the dishwasher and make sure all the lunches are ready for tomorrow before I head off to bed.