Visiting family

During my recent visit to DerbyshireDaughter and family we enjoyed a seasonal lantern parade round a few streets in Hadfield. This is the bee lantern made by DD and the boys, M & H. When I told Toad about the lantern he expressed scepticism about the appropriateness of a bee lantern in December. I said: "ivy bee". He didn't know about ivy bees, it seems (neither did I until recently). It might not be a good ivy bee portrait but with some artistic licence and the requirements of such lanterns, it was just fine! The parade was fun and there were lots of impressive lanterns.

DD and family are very fond of board games and have some excellent ones old and new. This board is one of the new ones, Photosynthesis.

While in Derbyshire I started a temari. I haven't made one for a while so was relearning a few of the nifty ideas I'd acquired when I made them more often, such as how great circles work in thread. This design, called Phoenix by Diana Vandervoort in her book, Temari Traditions: more techniques for Japanese thread balls, does not work too well on the size of ball I was using. Well, I say 'doesn't work' but the whole ball will work when I've finished my adaptations.

Temari 2018

I thoroughly enjoyed the boys' school rendering of the Nativity play. M's part was that of a cool dude angel with tinsil-edged wings and M was a happy shepherd.

My train journey to the house where I grew up, where my mum and my youngest brother (her carer now she is old and frail) still live, was straightforward. As always the mosses and liverworts on the back garden paths were amazing. The picture shows a small part near the back door.

When I left to come back to Scotland the rising sun was glorious.

sunrise in N Lancs 13 December 2018

Bryophytes and sunlight to punctuate a two day stay during which a highlight was a visit from my eldest brother and his wife. We are a spread out family so it's good to meet up when we can. When middle brother saw the photo below he sent some of recent chill in upstate New York where he lives. See below.

mum, eldest bro, me, youngest bro, sister-in-law

Finally, on my train journey back up north (even norther, I should say) I found myself within uncomfortable hearing distance of an unconscious sniffer 😣. One learns from experience: I now travel with earplugs! In they went. They weren't needed for long as he got off at the first stop. Phew.

The Boggy Brae 2014 Gingerbread House

First the microscope and bryology books and general Nelly clutter are cleared off the work table >>>>

Then a member of Gryffindor House
makes the dough

While doing so, she looks up and spots Magnetic Hippo's new 'hiding place' on a carafe drying stand that hangs over the cooker hood. He has been there for ages :)

Nelly leaves Toadlet (the Hogwarts pupil) and DivingDaughter to get on with it. When she returns she finds her South American music CDs used as building props. Novel! Actually, they nearly used novels instead.

She also notices some gaps where the rain and wind could get in...

...and that, on removing some of the outside CDs so that the icing cement Toad then pushed into the gaps would not drip on them, discovered more CDs inside.






Next day Toadlet and DivingDaughter did some decorating.

DivingDaughter's side and gable end

and Toadlet's

and the gingerbread forest with wild honeysuckle and a rockman, sorry, snowman.

This is DivingDaughter's fridge back home in Edinburgh

I don't know if she and her flatmates have eaten their house yet, but by the end of Boxing Day she had helped the rest of us at the Boggy Brae to polish off the forest, including all the undecorated trees that Nelly found and did herself.

All are agreed that it's darn good gingerbread!

Happy New Year to All!

Magnetic hippo

Some years ago – at least eight and possibly more – DivingDaughter sent a little wooden hippo fridge magnet to her little sister, Toadlet, and described a game we could play with it.

The game is a little bit like hide and seek except that you don't hide the hippo exactly but just attach it, not necessarily very obviously, to something metal. When someone other than the hider finds the hippo they detach it and re-attach it somewhere else. In short, you can move the hippo if you didn't put it in its current place. You don't say anything.

The hippo has been lost for years. Today I found it in the cellar!

DivingDaughter had gone down into the cellar to find something she stores there and my elder grandson, who is four, went with her. He wasn't satisfied until everyone else in the house had been down there too and kept sending up this message with whoever had just been down and decided to resurface: "If anyone else wants to come down into the cellar, now's their chance."

So I went down the ladder. On my infrequent visits to the cellar I look around to see what decluttering I can do and remove empty boxes and things we no longer want but which someone else might find useful.

Elder grandson and his family set off on their journey back to Derbyshire this afternoon with some coat and hat hooks for their new house, an electric pump for airbeds, paddling pools and the like, and three bottles of homemade apple wine made in three different batches nine or ten years ago. I guess they could make a sausage casserole with some of it if it's not very gluggable. My best wines were generic reds made with mixtures of fruits such as elderberries, blackberries, blackcurrants, raspberries, sloes, rhubarb. We glugged those pretty fast. The apple wines were less successful so they were put in the cellar and forgotten about to mature.

I also found Magnetic Hippo in the box containing the no longer used coats hooks. That was nice as I'd supposed he had slid down the back of a radiator or somehow else got lost forever on his wanderings.

Magnetic Hippo game restarted today.