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Yesterday we moved the seemingly unwieldy jumble of boxes from the conservatory to the spare bedroom. Suddenly, they didn't seem so unwieldy at all. It was as if each box shrunk as we carried it upstairs. It just makes sense to have the boxes in a room where none of the contents are staying so that each box can be carried out and unpacked in its proper room. Plus, I can just shut the door and pretend the boxes aren't there at all!
That also means we have the conservatory back. After a little cleaning and decorating, it'll be nice to be able to sit at the table and have tea and Sunday papers. And, seeing as how this is my first Thanksgiving as a married lady, I'd also like to make some sort of Thanksgiving dinner for us this year and having a proper dining room to eat in is kind of required.
And, no, the irony of having my first married Thanksgiving in England is not lost on me.
It's beginning to look and feel a little more like home around here. There are new throws on the sofas and a vase of dahlias and I even unpacked my favorite piece of art and set it on the mantle.
(an old photo because I hate the idea of a post without one)
Thank goodness I found a husband who didn't flinch at all when I asked he felt about this picture and if we could, maybe, at least temporarily anyway, hang it above the fireplace.
Matt's doing an overnight at work again and I really wanted use this time to get a lot more done around here but an allergy attack has caused me to spend most of the evening reading Revolutionary Road (so good) and staring across the room in a hazy stupor. That said, I'm going to bed early. My mother-in-law and my sister-in-law. Ruth, who's down from Bath for a couple of days, are coming into town tomorrow morning and I'm going to meet them for a cup of tea and, I suspect, a little shopping. Plus I'm oddly excited about getting a haircut tomorrow - it's been awhile.
Do you ever write a post and think, "Should I even bother to post this, for Pete's sake?" Yeah, that's how I feel about this one but I'm going to publish it anyway.
Huh, rather than "publish" I typed "pretty" (and fixed it, of course) - I need to go to bed.
A few days ago I joined a group over on Ravelry called The Blog Hub for knitting blogs and then realized that, even though it's nearly the biggest word over there in my category cloud, this blog hasn't seen a bit of knitting in a long time. So just to prove that I really do knit, a post about knitting.
I bound off the body of my FLS, literally, minutes ago. After seeing how pretty Ginny's was turning out and then how it actually turned out, I went into FLS overdrive. I had started this back in the summer but packed it in Matt's suitcase when he went home in June after the wedding assuming that I'd be able to pick it back up in three weeks and have it finished for fall. Of course, things didn't really work out that way and it stayed in his suitcase up until a week or two ago when I finally pulled it out and got on with it.
It might go into slight hibernation because I think my size eight double points are in one of the many boxes downstairs marked CRAFT SUPPLIES. I'm afraid to check the stash I either didn't ship or bought over the summer for fear that I won't find any but but kind of figure I'll attack the boxes tomorrow if that's the case. I think I might have even marked the box they're in with an extra KNITTING NEEDLE label because I've moved enough to know that it's good to make sure the things you'll need are easy to find.
When I got here last month I started on the Beachcomber Bag. One word: bobbles. It's in hibernation until I finish the FLS, Buddy's sweater and maybe a bit more of the Gooseberry Cardigan which is in the early, not worth photographing stages.
It's pretty, though, and I like the yarn quite a bit.
One last, non-knitting photo. I found that living here requires you to carry a change purse as well as a wallet since, instead of dollar bills, there are pound and two pound coins which means you're almost guaranteed to be carrying around a some times not so small stash of change. It took a lot of searching but I finally found the perfect one yesterday...meet the Elusive Purse Mouse.
Yesterday I decided I didn't care if I looked like a tourist and took some photos I've been meaning to take for awhile along our walk to Fisherton Mill - a place that I've been meaning to blog about for awhile.
I love these clever flower pots. It's a great idea garden idea for those of you who happen to have a couple of cracked kayaks and a tiny, leaky rowboat just lying around.
This is my favorite storefront - abandoned or otherwise - and not just because it's shades of my favorite color although that's probably what initially caught my eye. I wonder what it looked like inside when it was still open for business. I'm afraid it's going to be purchased one day and, unless it's bought by a family called Knight that wants to sell fish and poultry, the front will be destroyed.
To the right is a cute little gift shop/Cath Kidston reseller called Lulu's. We stopped in yesterday to see if they had her cute mini agenda books in stock but, unfortunately, that's one of the few things you can only buy in an actual Cath Kidston shop.
Now on to The Mill. Matt and I went to Fisherton Mill on my very first day in Salisbury back in November of last year. I guess you would call it our first date even though we'd known each other via email and phone calls for a little over three months.
I remember sitting across from him, just as nervous as can be, wanting to hold his hand as it sat there on the table top, just an inch and a half from mine, but just being too afraid. We'd only hugged at the airport, after all. Even though it was clear that we were crazy about one another before I'd arrived, it was a little different once we met in real life. I was mad about him in person as well and attempted to put out little signals but I wasn't sure how he felt. Matt was too gentlemanly to be too forward and make a move and, obviously, my signals must have really been a bit weak because he wasn't picking them up at all. We worked it out eventually - although, considering that we're married and I've moved 4,000 miles to a new country to be with him, that's probably pretty obvious.
Up until yesterday we've managed to always sit at that same first table.
The Mill is half cafe, half gallery and gift shop with works by local artists. My favorite thing about the Mill, though, is their flapjacks.
I've yet to make my own flapjacks but I have a tin of Golden Syrup downstairs that's just waiting for some oats and a good recipe. I tried making them when I lived in the states using honey, I think, because we don't have Golden Syrup and they were disastrous. Little burnt hockey pucks. Tomorrow, though, I'm hoping to have a post about the honey toffee I made with GS and an insane amount of honey but we're still waiting for it to harden. I wanted to make some to take to Guy Fawkes/Bonfire Night and am glad I decided to give it a test run (i.e. excuse to make something sweet) otherwise I would have made it the day of and it never would have been ready to break up and take with us.
That other chocolaty thing was a hedgehog cake. Good but not as good as the flapjack!
Here's another kind of blurry shot of the cafe. The gift shop part is the glaringly bright section.
Matt bought me a cute pair of tiny heart shaped earrings and these adorable buttons/badges (more things are called something else here than you realize).
Speaking of cute - there was an insanely cute King Charles Spaniel (I only know this because there was one in Buddy's puppy class) under the table next to us. Matt even offered to ask if I could take a photo because I was too shy but I just don't think they would've understood why I wanted to take a picture like that - something mundane yet, I think, as cute as a well behaved dog under a table. I need to get over worrying about what other people think and being shy because now I wish I had taken the photo!
I avoided being the Uber Tourist and didn't snap one of the red telephone box in the close on our way into town. I have to admit, though...I did take one of those on that very first trip nearly one year ago but I really was a tourist back then. :)
Matt needs to get to back to work so I'm going to surrender the computer - maybe tomorrow I'll actually catch up on my emails....
After a fantastic breakfast of potatoes, bacon and French toast unlike any French toast I'd ever had (with herbs grilled in the egg instead of drenched in syrup), we had planned to walk over to Polly's for tea but as we were walking out the door, Matt suggested we go for a drive instead.
We ended up in Shaftesbury, about a half hour or so away from Salisbury, where we wandered a little bit before walking down to a little cafe called the Salt Cellar. Unfortunately, although the view is stunning from their front door...
...the service was terrible. We sat at a table for about ten minutes as the waitstaff blatantly looked the other way when Matt tried to catch their eye. So we got up and left. Tthe brownies at the next cafe were worth the wait, though.
On the way home we stopped off at Wardour Castle. It's set so far off the main road you begin to wonder, more than once, as you feel sick from all the twisty roads, if you've taken a wrong turn or if there even really is a castle. There is, though, and it was so stunning I took over a hundred photos! Thankfully, I will only subject you to a tiny handful. :)
Due to the sun, I couldn't get a very good photo of the front of the castle -
but the back was really the photo worthy side anyway.
Its one thing to wander around the ruins of a castle but they have actually repaired the floors so you can explore all four floors and really imagine what it would have felt like to walk up the winding staircases, dressed in the gowns of the 14th century.
Perhaps you might even pause on your way to the hall for dinner to peer out the window at the changing leaves of fall....
If it were four hundred years later, though, I guess you might have paused to carve your name in the stone while your parents weren't looking.
Graffiti from the 1800s!
A little Wardour Castle point of Alan Rickman interest: I didn't know this until Matt pointed it out (obviously, since I didn't even know the castle existed until we passed the sign and he asked if I'd like to check it out) but Wardour was used as Robin Hood's ancestral home in Kevin Costner's Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
Anyway, if you come to visit me from the states, we'll most definitely take you to see this castle in person. It was really amazing.
When we got home we had just enough time to get snarf a bit of frozen pizza and change before heading out to Southampton with Matt's mum to see The Sound of Music. Really fantastic. I've been battling a pretty terrible case of homesickness, though, for about the past twenty four hours (since we had a nice, long Skype chat with my parents) so, oddly, I was in near tears for almost all of the performance. I have no idea why - it's not like Austria reminds me of Ohio or anything and, even though Mom and I have watched lots of musicals together, The Sound of Music was never one of them. Anyway, all of that homesickness stuff is a post for another day - or perhaps not a post at all.
I need some cathartic knitting, I think. I haven't really sat down to knit in about a week so I think I'll channel my Ginny Finished her FLS jealousy in to a couple hours of knitting of my own. Matt's at work today, it's too cold and rainy to walk anywhere and I'm getting pretty good at pushing the overwhelmed feelings away and ignoring the stacks of boxes to unpack in the conservatory....
I don't know if there will ever come a time when we drive through the New Forest and I don't feel a child-like thrill to see ponies, horses and cows grazing on the side of the road. I don't mean they're grazing on the side of the road in the way those of us from the states are used to - behind fences - no, these are free to wander and graze. So you'll often see something like this mare and her foal.
I was asking Matt if he ever actually saw pigs in the New Forest or did they hide out a bit deeper, off the road and not ten minutes later we found this trio munching acorns off to the right.
I loved their snorty sounds and the way their giant ears covered their eyes.
The New Forest was created by William I in 1079 as a hunting ground for deer. The commoners have since then had rights to, amongst other things, turn livestock out in to the forest. I can't say that I understand it much past that but I did read an interesting article the other day in Country Living, I think, about how they round up the hundreds of horses in the fall for health checks and branding. That must be something to see.
Parts of the forest landscape are hard to describe. They're unlike anything I've seen in the states. The best description I could come up with was what would be created if the Great Smokey Mountains and the desert decided to get together and have a baby. Lush and green but strangely dry looking at the same time. Impossible to describe.
This is a view from Ashley's Walk and is the first bit of the New Forest that I really ever saw back when I visited in November of last year. I remember that it was amazingly windy and that I snapped a few photos of a shaggy cow not too far off the path. A horse ambled by us at one point, too. I was also probably insanely nervous because I think it was only my second day with Matt. It was really nice to walk on that same path today, less than a year later, as a married couple. The weather was perfect when I took these photos but there were no cattle or horses along the path - just a few grazing off in the distance.
We did see a tiny herd of cattle as we were pulling in the car park, though.
We were also lucky enough to spot a deer grazing beneath a tree on our way back up the path. She let us get fairly close before bounding off in to the brush.
Another breathtaking view....
And another...
And one more...
Seriously, I don't know if I could ever come here without my camera.
Buddy along with his new pals Tallulah, my brother's girlfriend's dog, and Cooper, my brother's dog who is only a few days younger than Buddy. From what Mom said Wednesday night, they all got on great and I wouldn't be surprised to get a photo from my parents in the not too distant future of Buddy and another miniature or standard schnauzer. If they do get a second dog I really think they should name him Ol' Pal.
"Come here, Buddy, Ol' Pal!"
I met up with a new friend, Squiblet, from the Sunday afternoon knitting group today. Like I said before, I love Matt but it was really nice to hang out with a girl for a little bit. After showing me some of the sewing/craft shops in Salisbury (yaay!), we went to a cafe I'd not been to yet called Polly's, for tea and cake and, I think, had a great time. It's nice to have someone to ask what seem like silly questions like where are the best places to shop for clothes - although when you're in a completely new country, that's really not such a silly question.
As if I didn't have enough tea and sweet things, I came home and had lunch and decided a good book and more tea was a good idea since I'd yet to use the tea set for grown ups that my mother-in-law gave me the other day.
Note, Ginny, the tray and mat - now that I've unpacked it, we use it almost daily!
Ugh, unfortunately now I'm feeling all full and lethargic and not at all like doing any unpacking. We got a lot done yesterday, though. We unwrapped the amazingly well packed (by the moving company, not us) grandfather clock and took all of our broken down boxes, packing popcorn and paper to the recycling facility. It felt so to good to get it all out of the house and getting the giant clock out of the pile of boxes makes me feel like we've really made progress - it was huge. Unpacking is a slow process but it's definitely starting to feel like our home around here.
Oh, I saw someone get a ticket just a little bit ago for parking on our street which is reserved for residents only during the day. It seems like a strange thing to blog about but I was fascinated by his thoroughness. He wrote the ticket and then took photos of the front of the car and then a couple of the inside or possibly just the front windshield due maybe to a missing or expired parking sticker. After all those pictures, he took one of the restriction sign which was only a few feet away. Then he finished up the ticket, put it in an envelope with sticky tape on it, taped it to the top of the window on the drivers side, took a photo of it on the car and then wrote in his little notepad for several minutes before finally setting off in search of other villainous vehicles. See? Really thorough.
