We still have stormy weather, but at least it has stopped raining, so our plans to use the decking to build an ark have been put on hold. We have actually even had a sunny day! Our friend Kevin was finally able to finish repairing the garden fence for us by concreting in new supports, thank goodness.

But as it hasn't been weather for doing much, I have finished knitting a winter jumper for D-d from some large yarn cakes I bought about 5 years ago, then didn't use. She asked especially for a slightly longer one than I usually make - and was really pleased when she came around on Saturday and picked it up.

I wish I had taken a picture of her wearing it, as it looked much better on her than it does in the picture I took before she came -



I did take a few hours away from it to knit these -



Four baby booties to match, as the daughter of the physio aide that has looked after me over the past few months was expecting twin baby girls. I was just in time to give them, as the babies and the bootees arrived more or less concurrently last week - the girls are called Fern and Violet.

S2C showed me this, which had turned up in his Pinterest suggestions.

It is too good not to share -

This year all the prompts are six letter words.

So - A was for Aerial;



B was for Barbed. I meant to take a picture of my copy of Island of Barbed Wire, but I couldn't find it. But I realised this book would work instead!



C was for Camera. Clearly there were a lot of pictures of cameras.

However my plan was to go up Douglas Head and take a picture of the Camera Obscura. But even on the day it wasn't actually raining we still had gale force winds and, even though I thought the relevant side of the Head might be sheltered, as I walked down the path I was in danger of being blown off my feet, despite being well ballasted! So I took a picture of the sign, instead 🙂 This was fine for the prompt.



But if I had been able to go down and get a proper picture it would have looked like this, which I took a few years ago;



When I took the picture of the sign, I also took a picture of the view from the top of the Head.



Back to the Alphabet - D was for Debris. I so wanted to post a picture of debris4spike's LJ page... but there was a lot of storm debris on the beach;



And I could have taken the picture of the debris, or the angry sea, almost any day in the last 4 weeks - I am beginning to get bored with permanent 50 - 75mph winds. (Apparently sometime late afternoon tomorrow they might drop to 25-30 mph - what joy!)

We seem to have had stormy weather with hardly a break for the past two weeks or more - so I am mainly sitting around knitting and reading, venturing out to shop occasionally, and for my weekly sessions at the physio gym.

There is time, therefore to fall into internet rabbit holes. So - I clicked on one of those '10 things' slide shows on the MNS homepage... and falling into Wonderland would have been less surreal than

From the past to the plate: Old-fashioned dishes your grandparents ate as kids.

I can't decide whether AI wrote the entire thing, or was just used to translate from... well I'm not sure what, as the foods appear to be from the USA, so surely the original language would have been English? But if you told me it had been translated from Klingon using AI I would not have been surprised.

WARNING; DO NOT CLICK ON THE LINK WHILST DRINKING UNLESS WANT TO SNORT IT ALL OVER YOUR PHONE/KEYBOARD AS YOU ROLL AROUND LAUGHING!

And, because these things can disappear quickly, I have copied and pasted it here( Read more...Collapse )

I have noted when the first flower opened on our pink camellia (Barbie) for the last few years.

Only 3 or 4 years ago it was early February - this year it was 5 days ago, so on 16th January.

Today there are quite a few buds opening -



And that first flower alread looks like this -



It is wet and windy today - it has been wet and windy for most of January - and so although the hellebores have been in flower for a couple of weeks now, they do not look as good as they have for the past couple of years -





And, changing the subject totally, a friend gave me a gift bag at Christmas which contained a Christmas Tea-towel, a new wooden spoon, a really good balloon whisk (which she had managed to fill with sweets!), and a Mr Kipling Chocolate cake mix and a tub of Betty Crocker chocolate fudge frosting.

I thought it was an excellent gift - but left using the cake mix and the frosting until it would be a D&D day and the four teenagers would be here to help eat the results.

So on Friday afternoon I made the cake. Which, honestly, was no quicker or easier than doing it from scratch as you needed to add milk, eggs, and melted butter, so the mix was basically SR flour, cocoa and sugar!

NYK2, coincidentally, got a rather professional piping set from a friend's mother. So I picked her up earlier than usual and she tried out her gift by decorating the cake.

There are photos ( under this cutCollapse )

It's another blustery, rainy, evening; very January.

It was very similar on Sunday - and when I got home from church and gazed out of the kitchen window as I waited for the kettle to boil I thought, 'something's not quite right out there...' Then realised it was that the oldest part of the back fence was swaying in the wind!

The large, solid, upright post, to which it had been firmly bolted, had rotted in the middle - so that the force of the wind on the fence had pulled the bolt out of the wood.

So - a quick emergency repair before it all came down; S2C and I go out and manage to wire the fence to the remains of the post by passing lengths of wire backwards and forwards between him, inside the garden, and me outside, on the footpath between our house and our neighbour's. I leant, heavily, on the fence to push it back firmly against the post whilst he fastened each wire - and was really touched that another neighbour, out walking his dog, stopped at the opening to the little path to check that I wasn't ill.

We have a friend who is a joiner/carpenter and he is going to call around tomorrow or Friday to see what needs doing to make the fence fully wind-proof again. So, currently, I am peering out the window in the dark making sure the emergency repair is still holding up since this wind blew up a couple of hours ago - and hoping it dies down quickly!

I've just realised this is my first post for 2026. How did that happen?

The Christmas decorations are almost all put away, and we have had snow which kept me from venturing far for 3 days.

A couple of mandatory snow pics...

When I woke up on Sunday morning I knew, by the quality of the light through the blinds in the bedroom, that it had snowed. And sure enough - this was the view;



And this was the garden on Monday -





The temperature remained below freezing until overnight Tuesday/Wednesday when it got to about 3C and rained heavily. So now there is no snow to be seen... for now.

As for the quote in my subject line - what poor Robin did, along with a couple of black birds, a wren, some starlings, the magpies and a couple of jackdaws, was enjoy the seeds and dried mealworms I put in, and around, the feeders.

...............

Now for part 2 of this post - the last set of 2025 AtoZ photos from Flikr; December.

W is for WIRE;



X is for XMAS;



Y is for YULE;




(I didn't have a Yule log to hand 😁)

Z is for ZETA - as the admin explained, Zeta is the sixth letter in the Greek alphabet and has a value of 7 in Greek numerals, so if we didn't have anything related to the letter, then something Greek, or 7 of something, was fine. I went with the latter option;



And, because of the calendar for this year, we also had a week 53 - for which the prompt was A TO Z;




I really didn't have to go far to find that one!

I have already signed up for the 2026 Group.

Thanks for the Birthday greetings! For some reason LJ is refusing to let me comment on friends posts at present (I know spikesgirl58 was having the same problem), so I can't say thank you in person.

So THANK YOU to (in no particular order as they say on Strictly Come Dancing), pondhopper, wiseheart, mrowe, halfmoon_mollie, shirebound, spikesgirl58, sallymn, enchantersnight, and apologies if I have missed you.

It was a quiet birthday - but continued into today when we had visits from NYK2, Lizzy and Edie, and D-d, through the afternoon and early evening.

Tomorrow is back to mundane life- physio for me first thing, and a follow-up appointment at the eye-specialist for S2C later in the morning - and there will need to be shopping, too!

I have some festive pictures to share. Not of yesterday's lunch and present sharing at D-d's, even the kids put their phones down for a while... and we four adults didn't touch ours at all!

But there are some pictures of our house, and some more pictures of the decorated church which I remember telling lblanchard I had taken and would post.

So as there are rather a lot I will put them under two cuts. Firstly ( Our home at ChristmasCollapse )

And here are just a few from Church ( under another cut...Collapse )

Oh - and finally, the Christmas cake that was made originally for a WI event, which was cancelled due to a severe storm - pictured here on our hall table as I was about to take it to D-d's with me on Christmas Day!



Still with the original holly leaves and stars. The three on the cake might have been better without the gold finish, to be honest. The ones at the bottom were just spares cut from the remaining fondant in case I needed them for anything!

Nollick Ghennal! Merry Christmas!

Have a lovely day. I am off to church in a little while, then we will spend the day with D-d and her family.