Summer is here...

Just a few pictures from the veg patch...



It's all coming along now - the potatoes have come out, and the onions. The sweetcorn went in a couple of weeks ago and I have planted lots of salad and beans. The only thing failing me this time seems to be the tomatoes. I was lazy and put them straight into the soil rather than planting them into pots first to bring them on. Last year this seemed to work fine (although to be truthful, tomatoes don't do that well in this climate anyway and I usually end up with some ripe ones in October or so...) but this year nothing seems to come up. It's too late now to try with the seeds again so hopefully I'll pick up a few plants somewhere.

~*~

Last weekend we took our trusty little camper Eddie out and went camping - for the first time ever!! We've used Eddie a lot since he joined our family in January, but so far we hadn't ventured into proper camping. This was partly due to the weather, but partly also to our own nervousness. I've never really been much of a camping-kind-of-girl but D loves it, so I was willing to try. It turns out that it can be good fun!

We didn't go far - just ventured into the North Yorkshire Moors and stayed at a campsite close to Helmsley. Initially it wasn't that great - very windy and we only managed to get the very last spot on the campsite, meaning we were right by the entrance and completely in the shade... COLD! Still, it was kind of nice to cook our evening dinner (pasta with tomato sauce) on the tiny stove and the bean absolutely loved the camper and all the tents around us. We even found that the boot of the camper, without folding the bed out, makes a perfect bean cot - it has the matress and the back seat means that he can't roll out during the night. He slept till 6.20am, which sounds pretty early, but is absolutely spectacular when you consider that he usually gets up at 5am. In fact, the night before he'd got up at 3.45am... *yawn*

We spent the bank holiday Monday in Helmsley, where we discovered a lovely walled garden, and took the long scenic route via the moors back to our spot.




Not our last camping trip, that much is certain!

Oh my god, it's May...

That means that I have been MIA for, what, 4 months?!

The good news is, though, that I am now officially free of teaching for the summer, and while that sadly does not mean that I am also free of work (2-3 papers ready for publication is my aim) it does mean that work will progress at a much more flexible and leisurely pace (no more last-minute dashes to the library to finish a lecture for tomorrow morning), which in turn usually translates into some extra time to do silly things like.... knit, spin, and post in my blog!

I've been missing this blog so much, so I am looking forward to getting back into a regular routine of posting. And since I've already made significant inroads into the all the tasks that have been left until such a time when I am not bogged down by teaching prep: I have done laundry, which was very very necessary - I had to dig a path to the washing machine because the stacks of laundry were that high; I went food shopping - yay, we have fresh food in the house; I planted my veg patch - the shoots have already started appearing; and I have started cleaning the house - this one is going to take me a while longer I fear... . Anyway, since I have made inroads into all these 'chores' I felt that I was justified spending a pleasurable half hour posting on my neglected blog.

The other reason why I think I might get back to posting a bit more is this:


Yes, that's right, bean #2, aka 'tick' is on the way. He/she is due in mid-November, which makes me about 13 weeks pregnant now. I'm (hopefully) over the really miserable first trimester of extreme tiredness and 24/7 nausea (so much worse than with bean #1, or have I just forgotten this?!), and my belly has just started popping out a bit. It's so exciting!

Anyway, because of all this there should be more movement on the blog from now on - more knitting (got to knit for my second winter baby, right?), more gardening, and of course there are all the new developments on the ongoing project that is our home...

It's good to be back. :-)