Oh man :(

My dad just dropped my favourite coffee cup and the handle broke off Don’t you just hate it when that happens?

We have a collection of broken mugs scattered around the place. On the desk in front of me is one with a chip in that holds pencils. I have one on my desk for my hairsticks and forks. I already have my pencils in one with a muffin on it (which has always been used for that purpose and never to hold coffee or muffins), so I guess this one’ll have to hold…I don’t know, any ideas?

Italy photos

I’ve finally managed to upload some pictures of my trip to Italy. I tried for a long time to sign up with Flickr, but couldn’t get my head around the sign up process. Then I tried photobucket, and now I see why everyone uses it! The upload system is so simple and it was a doddle to start using. My only complaint is that it took me a long time to figure out how to get the link to my album.

And speaking of the link to my album…

Tadaa!

Tidy up

If you’re particularly observant and have also visited this neck of the netwoods before, you may have noticed that I’ve tidied things up a little. I haven’t really bothered to pay much attention to my blog’s sidebar since I changed the theme (whenever that was), so things have got a bit cluttered and out-of-date.

One thing that really struck me is just how many more blogs I read now than I did a couple of months ago. I used to manually check the 3 or 4 blogs that interested me each day. Then I graduated to using netvibes to subscribe to RSS feeds. After I’d filled up two tabs with feeds, I decided that it was time to do the job properly. I investigated a couple of different RSS readers, but the only one I liked was bloglines, which I’m still using faithfully.

I subscribe to new blogs almost daily. Mostly, I come across new blogs by seeing links in ones I already read, though I also use sites like blogged and stumbleupon (I use the wordpress channel) to discover new places. The blogs that I read are almost exclusively book-centric or pretty much daily journals, though there’s still a few teaching blogs that I read that have hung on from my academic phase a couple of months back.

Since I’m talking about blogging and all, now seems like a good time throw in the fact that I’ve started another blog, centred around my reading. I read a lot of book blogs and for a while I’ve wanted to get more involved, so I’ve set up Booktrash. It’s still very much a work in progress, but watch this space!

Winter

I just looked up quotes about winter in the hope that I’d find something appropriate with which to begin this entry, but all the quotes I could find were about winter as a cold, desolate, bleak thing, to be endured but not cherished. My view is the polar opposite.

I love how it gets dark in the afternoon. I’ve always preferred things when it’s dark; it’s so much cosier indoors and so much more exciting outdoors because everything is different in the dark.

I love walking home in the twilight.

I love getting to school and standing outside with my friends, stamping our feet in the cold, so that we can watch the sun come up over the fields.

I love going down to the wood when it snows and seeing the sunlight lighting up all the fields and walking round to the back where there’s a house on a hill that looks like something out of a story book.

I love getting up in the morning to turn the alarm off and then getting straight back into bed and curling up in the warm.

I love piling on layers and layers of clothes and snuggling into them. I love wrapping blankets around myself and curling up with a good book. I love lighting fires and candles every evening.

I love hearing all the Christmas songs on the radio – I hate the songs, but I love how they come back every year and everyone hates them just as much as always.

Winter means bonfire night, which means fireworks, which mean bonfires and the smell of woodsmoke and cracks and pops late at night and posters for the fireworks and standing outside in the garden, craning our necks so that we can see over the church to the school to watch the fireworks display.

Winter means being the first one to walk on the frost in the morning and hearing it crackle under my footsteps.

Winter means soft fluffy scarves and nice warm boots.

‘Winter must be cold for those with no warm memories‘, someone once said; I think that summer must be unbearable without winter to look forward to.

Catchup

I’ll just blow the dust off this thing then, shall I?

I’ve been meaning to post ever since I got back from Italy, but somehow I haven’t got round to it. I’ll post some photos at another time (if I ever get round to it!). It was one of the best weeks of my life – I got to see Venice, which is something I’ve always wanted to do ever since I can remember, and I also got to visit Verona and many other places in the locality of Lake Garda. For once, I’m telling the truth when I tell people I had a brilliant holiday!

I’ve been back at school this week, which isn’t an amazing amount of fun but then what do you expect? That’s just life. My timetable isn’t so bad and apart from in IT, I don’t have any truly awful teachers, so I’m busy thanking heaven for small mercies. It could be a lot worse (which is not to say it couldn’t be better!).