Whirlwind

The first of the (ten) visitors arrived yesterday: Daughter 2 and Littlest Granddaughter. The latter is very sweet (well, they both are) but something of a whirlwind. Daughter 2 is working from home, so we're Littlest-sitting. 

Here she is being relatively static. 

And here she's playing with the 1980s Shuffly Castle, which proved a big hit even though the princess and the queen don't shuffle as well as they did in 1980. Mind you, who does? 

Tonight, Daughters 1 and 2 and their children and I went to the light show at the Botanics. This is the photo that I took before my phone slipped from my hand and its screen smashed. Sigh. 

Now for a hot bath and bed with a good book. Tomorrow, the museum (if the whirlwind agrees). 

 

Santa stuff

We've now got round to decorating the house, some of which involves Mr L balancing on ladders. Then Saturday was the day we collected our Christmas tree from a charity for the homeless. 

And Saturday was also the day when we woke up to this. O joy. Our little street, a dead end on a hill, is always difficult to drive up when it's snowy, but fortunately we got out and reached the field where noble people were allocating the trees in the cold. 

And here is ours, with a suitably wintry background. The process involved Mr L lying around on the floor fitting the end of the trunk into a clamp and fixing the lights; also claiming that he's getting too old for this. It's a very small tree, to leave room for the 16 people who'll be in our house on Christmas Day - weather and various strikes permitting. Fortunately some of them are quite small. But messy. 

Meanwhile, also on Saturday, Daughter 2 took Littlest Granddaughter to Oxford. Here's Littlest standing outside Wadham College, where Daughter 1 went to study and (as it turned out) to meet Son-in-Law 1. 

Daughter 2 refrained from buying any merchandise like this.

She then met up with my brother, his wife and daughter, to see the pantomime for which my musician nephew is in the orchestra. This is his view of them, sitting in the front row of the circle. 

At that point, it hadn't snowed in London. But now it has. Littlest and the big boy next door built a snowman. 

This is Littlest, dragging an improvised sledge behind her. Daughter has now ordered a proper sledge, thus ensuring that it won't snow in London for another ten years. 

Despite our Edinburgh snow having more or less gone, it's jolly cold - something like minus 7C at night, which is most unusual here. Google tells me that this is 19.4F. I do tend to think in F still, despite our having adopted C in... just looked it up... 1962. Sixty years. I'm slow to adopt changes... Anyway, I know that 70F is getting a bit hot, 80F is much too hot and 90F is - well, that doesn't happen in Scotland, thank goodness. I'm also aware that 60F isn't very impressive for the summer, and thus grounds for complaint, but I don't really remember being aware of F temperatures in winter. I do remember my dad telling me, when we changed over to C, that 10 is cold, 20 is warm and 30 is much too hot and I still go by that. Living as we do in a temperate climate, we don't have to bother much with exact figures. It's normally cold, but not horrendously so, in winter; less cold or even mild in spring and autumn; and warm or occasionally hottish in summer. That's usually enough. 

Talking about the weather is an indication that nothing much is happening: walks, a bit of Christmas prep (not enough), singing, some socialising and a lot of quilting. 

Littlest Granddaughter: Daddy, Santa isn't real.

Son-in-Law 2: Oh, isn't he?

LG: No, the elves just made him up for fun. 

Well, it's one explanation. 

I've just noticed a comment from Willow Caroline - hello, lovely to hear from you! I'm delighted that you enjoyed your British soujourn but wish we could have met up for a coffee! I'm also intrigued by your comment about "hill walking that wasn't really hill walking" - do you mean that it was more scrambling than walking? We went up Cat Bells a few years ago and I remember bits of that being quite scrambly. But worth it, for the views!

 

Bits and pieces

It's been a very un-newsworthy ten days of coughing (but not Covid), during which we've done nothing much except (in my case) finish Medium Granddaughter's dragon quilt. It's very bright and a bit higgledy-piggledy and not at all adventurous in any technical way, but was nice and easy to make. 

I carefully used up more or less all the dragon fabric I'd bought - the big rainbow dragons, the much smaller but also multi-coloured ones and the dark blue - and had fun putting in some other favourite materials, quilting lots of hearts and such like. And then Big Granddaughter said she wanted a dragon quilt too so I had to get some more dragon fabric to make hers, next year. 

For the back, I used bits and pieces. So thrifty... .

And after we'd started coughing a lot less, we had a flying visit from Daughter 2 and a friend this weekend, and also Son and family. Here he is, having transmogrified from Dr D to Mr Criminalsson, a change which sees him pursued round the garden by Superwoman and Santa, ie his son and his nephew, who are policemen. They catch him; he escapes; they chase him again. It's a simple game but hey, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a novel about something similar. 

I was intrigued by what Frances said in a comment about English "streets" being different from English "roads". I don't live in England, but I don't think they are. (Are they?) One can live on either. I suppose the big ones - motorways and such - are always roads rather than streets, but roads can also be small. I think both tend to be a bit bigger than those called Close, Gardens, View, Terrace, Avenue... but not necessarily. And you would probably talk about "the main road" in a town and "the main street" in a village, so I suppose that would be because of their size. But one could have houses on either.