2014 - the year in books

In terms of books, 2014 wasn't too different from 2013. I struggled to find time to read, started but haven't yet finished multiple books and really, really miss reading but don't quite seem to be able to find my way back to it. A lot of that was down to having to study. Even though I didn't study half as much as I should have and didn't read half as many newspapers as I really should have, even the amount I did do meant less time for reading. And I started cycling to work, so don't even have the six or seven minutes on the tram to get a couple of pages read. Still, I did read some good books this year so here's the list. Although, true to the year it has been, I'm not even entirely sure I have a full list!

If you're interested in seeing lists for previous years, click 2012, 2011 or 2010. I'm joining in with Clickclackgorilla's booklovers' bloghop again this year. If you're posting a list of books that you've read this year, or about your favourite book or similar, click on over to bookpunks and link up.

(BC) = Book club books 
(RR) = something I've re-read - there are some books, such as by Georgette Heyer, that I invariably read every year when the escapism of new fiction isn't enough and I want to escape into familiar stories that always make me laugh or cry.

1. Sweet Tooth - Ian McEwan
2. The Devil's Children - Peter Dickinson
3. Heartsease - Peter Dickinson
4. Embers - Sandor Marai (BC)
5. Barnheart - Jenna Woginrich
6. Made from Scratch - Jenna Woginrich
7. Racing in the Rain - Garth Stein (BC) (accidentally bought this children's version first - totally ridiculous adaptation of a, if not the, major plot point to make it suitable for kids made this silly book even more tedious)
8. The Art of Racing in the Rain - Garth Stein (BC)
9. Hit by a Farm - Catherine Friend
10. One Hundred Great Books in Haiku - David Bader
11. Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - Mary Ann Shaffer
12. A Tree grows in Brooklyn - Better Smith
13. Perfect - Rachel Joyce (BC)
14. Hard-Boiled Wonderland - Haruki Murakami (BC)
15. The City and the City - China Mieville (BC)
16. This Organic Life - Joan Dye Gussow
17. The Postman - David Brin
18. The Hedge Knight - George R. R. Martin
19. The Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell
20. Downturn Abbey - Ross O'Carroll Kelly as told to Paul Howard
21. Mad About the Boy - Helen Fielding
22. Dragonflight - Anne McCaffrey (RR)
23. Dragonquest - Anne McCaffrey (RR)
24. Dragonsong - Anne McCaffrey (RR)
25. The White Dragon - Anne McCaffrey (RR)
26. Dragonsinger - Anne McCaffrey (RR)
27. Dragondrums - Anne McCaffrey (RR)
28. All the Weyrs of Pern - Anne McCaffrey (RR)
29. The Renegads of Pern - Anne McCaffrey (RR)
30. The Baker's Boy - J. V. Jones (RR)
31. A Man Betrayed - J. V. Jones (RR)
32. Master and Fool - J. V. Jones (RR)
33. Balthasar's Odyssey - Amin Maalouf (BC)
34. Keeping up with the Kalashnikovs - Ross O'Carroll Kelly as told to Paul Howard
35. Picknick auf dem Eis - Andrej Kurkov
36. Das Große Los - Meike Winnemuth (three chapters left, finishing today)
37. Tackling Depression - Ian Birthistle (one and a half chapters left, finishing today)

Day of Reading

I declared today a Day of Reading, hoping that I might actually get to finish one or more of the seven or so books I have started but not finished. It's now twenty to eight and I have read exactly zero pages of any books. Sigh.

When I got back on Sunday evening I broke the key in the lock of my front door. Luckily it happened just after I had actually opened the door so I didn't have to sit in the cold hallway while waiting for a very expensive Sunday night emergency locksmith visit. Last night, I had some friends over for dinner and one of them, who's a bit of a handyman, took the lock apart to see if it was possible to get the broken bit of key out. No go and I needed to get a new cylinder. So this morning, instead of curling up with a few books, I had to get up and out. Made a few phone calls first, to arrange to catch up with some friends who are in town for the holidays and then headed out. The small place on my road did have cylinders on sell but the prices started at 42.00 so I thought it might be worth the 15 minute tram journey to the big chain DIY place, Toom. Not a very big difference in price but I was able to get a good one (the type that lets you still open the door from one side if you forget to take the key out of the other side) for 34.99. And while I was there I picked up the three LED bulbs I needed.

I was just back on my street when W. rang to ask me if I was home as he wanted to come over and install the new cylinder. So that got done and while he was doing it I got the bulbs fitted. Then we sat and chatted for a short while until it was time for him to head off to meet someone. I heated up leftovers from last night for lunch and while that was heating took care of a couple of emails. Ate lunch and finished tidying away the dishes and was just starting to think I might be able to pick up a book when another friend rang to say she'd be there in twenty minutes. I had asked if she would be able to drive me to Ikea sometime. So, despite running through as quickly as possibly we were still in there for over an hour and a half. It was really crowded. I normally quite like Ikea and get lots of inspiration for trying out different things but today I just couldn't wait to get out of there.

I needed to buy a mattress and the Lattenrost (the wooden slats that go under the mattress) for the new bed frame, which was one of my birthday presents. Unfortunately they don't do the same mattresses they did six years ago so I could just get a bigger version of the single one I have and like. Typically, the one that was really comfy cost €600. I had €160 worth of vouchers and wanted to spend as little above that as possible. There were two others that were alright and from a price point of view far more reasonable so I went for one of them and grabbed the cheap wooden slats as well. I added two simple stools and a picture frame and was able to spend my vouchers plus just short of €30 of my own cash, so not too bad at all. J. and her son helped me carry the stuff up to my apartment after driving me home so now, here it is, nearly eight, I have my sitting room floor taken up with the mattress which is supposed to be left for 72 hours before being used (it was vacuum packed in a roll) and am kind of thinking maybe now would be a good time to crack open a book. Oh well, best laid plans and all that. I least I did achieve some things today.

8 things to get rid of

I saw a few people mentioning Apartment Therapy and their January Cure and decided I would sign up, too. Since then, even more bloggers that I read regularly have signed up and I'm kind of starting to get excited now. I have a very busy January and February ahead of me so I might only actually manage to do one or two days but that's still more than I would do otherwise so it's all good. I've been browsing the apartment therapy site and found an article that seemed like it would be a quick, fun fix for a bit of decluttering. Seems like I've already done most of them though. Oh well.

1. Coffee mugs - while I do have quite a few, I don't have many more than I use on a regular basis.
2. Travel size toiletries - don't have any, never take any the odd time I do stay in a hotel.
3. Old medication - did this a few years ago and now check everything at least once a year.
4. Vases - ha! I wish. I usually end up using jars for flowers. I have four vases, three of them quite small and only suitable for one or two flowers.
5. Food storage containers - well, we all know how much I love Tupperware and between that and preserving activities, I do have a lot but again, I do use it all so nothing much there to get rid of. I could, admittedly be far better organised though. 
6. Party supplies - I think last year I finally managed to use up the last paper napkins I had (I think they were five years old). I have one set of birthday candles and as for ordinary candles, well, I have an awful lot of them but use them every day. I've actually got very little in the way of plastic cutlery left and will need to keep an eye out next summer - I try to buy sturdy stuff that can be washed and re-used often.
7. Craft supplies - okay, probably could do with getting rid of or starting to use some of this up. On the plus side, what I have is more or less restricted to one cupboard and is semi-organised.
8. Books - did a huge clearout before leaving Ireland and am strict now on only keeping paper books that I will read again and again.

Mountains, too much food and Magic

Happy christmas all and thanks for the good wishes. I'm in my sister's in France for a few days (reminder to self that next time it really isn't worth paying the extra for a recliner on the night train) and having a chilled out, fun time.

We had the main xmas dinner yesterday evening, then did presents this morning. There were 72 presents under the tree! There are seven of us here. They were mostly small stocking filler type things with one or two bigger presents. I think the big hit though, was the Magic the Gathering gift set myself and my sister got for our nephew. He was so excited he was literally hopping and dancing. We were going to get him some booster packs of cards but then I saw the gift set - for the same price as four booster packs you got a collector's box that holds up to 2,000 cards including separator tabs, labels and four booster packs. He has already spent a couple of hours organising his cards today and when not actually doing it, he has been talking about the best ways to do it.

After presents I showed my nieces how to make icing and we iced the cake. We had last night's leftovers for lunch and after all that was cleared off, we went out for a walk. It's getting cold but with views like this, who could resist?



It drizzled a bit but the rain mostly held off and we had a lovely walk. And then I came back to make mince pies and a roast chicken dinner with all the trimmings. I really should make roast potatoes more often, they're soooo good. We rounded off the evening with a viewkng of Frozen. Can't believe there has been so much hype about it. There are some amusing lines but it can't compare to Aladdin or Little Mermaid at all. Still, it was a nice way to end the day. Now to get some sleep before seeing what tomorrow will bring. Hope everyone is having an equally enjoyable time no matter how you're spending it.

posted from Bloggeroid

Finding it hard to concentrate on the positive

I'm missing blogging more regularly and over the last week or so have found myself trying to figure out why, since I would like to be doing it, I'm not just actually doing it. I'm struggling a bit to fully understand it and also struggling a bit to articulate the glimmer of understanding I have at the moment.

It just feels like, although there are lots of good things happening in my life at the moment, any blog post will very quickly become negative. Because it feels a lot, at the moment, like the good stuff is pretty superficial and the slightest examination of it will expose a morass of not so good stuff. Most of the time I don't feel like anything much is wrong but just that if I allow myself to really think about it, I'll realise I'm teetering very close to the edge of a very bad phase. Kind of feel like I'm hanging on by a thread but by not thinking about the thread, I can ignore the sheer cliffs below.

Anyway, the function of the blog as a diary to look back on and remind myself of various things is one I find myself wanting more and more to get back to, so here's some of what has been happening the last couple of weeks.

One xmas cake baked. 2 batches of mincemeat made (a few weeks ago) and first batch of mince pies done. Batch of apple, pear and ginger mincemeat started this evening and fruit for second xmas cake soaking. I'm very late with the cakes but just haven't had the long baking time at home at all over the past few weeks. I also made an advocat cake for the first time last week and it went down very well in work, so I am pleased to have a new recipe to add to my repertoire.

I celebrated my birthday and in the end 25 people turned up to help me have a really wonderful evening. And I enjoyed the Viking Splash Tour the next day just as much as I'd hoped - our tour guide, Barry the Brutal, kept us laughing the whole time and I learned a couple of interesting new things about Dublin, too. The craft fair was great, too and although I had a lot of fun spending my sealed pot money, and going back on the Sunday to spend some more money I was given for my birthday, the best part was finding a guy who I realised would be able to make me something that I would love to give my brother. So I've commissioned a piece for his birthday in July and am excited beyond bits about it. And last but not least, the very sore back that I acquired a few weeks ago when babysitting for a two-year-old was all but taken care of by another lovely flotation session at the Harvest Moon Centre. So yeah, lots of positive to try and concentrate on!

Sealed pot opening 2014 and challenge aims for 2015

It's that time of year again, time to open up my sealed pot (see SFT's Life After Mortgage blog for other participants in this year-long challenge) and see how much my not terribly regular donations of spare change over the past year have amounted to. I thought it'd be less than last year as I kept forgetting about it to be perfectly honest. And I had no notes in this year's pot at all. I was very surprised when I lifted the pot down from it's shelf as it was far heavier than I had expected.

Hard to judge from this angle how much there is although there are a lot of 1 and 2 euro coins to be seen

All of that made a nice little pile though...

...even better looking when it was all counted and nicely stacked up though.

I have been saving my 50c pieces separately and they have now gone back into their money box and I'll continue putting away as many of the 50c pieces I get as possible and that money will go towards hopefully moving next year. €66 isn't bad (I miscounted at first and thought I had nearly €70, which just goes to show me that making little stacks like this is a great idea, since I'm obviously not capable of just counting coins properly). Although I didn't have any notes this year, and overall had fewer coins, I had a far larger percentage of higher denomination coins so my total, even without the 50c pot, was actually slightly higher! Hooray! Here's the breakdown:

Yep, that's right, even after I take away the 50c pot money, I still have a grand total of 

 €147.30

I had a lot of fun spending my sealed pot money at the National Craft and Design Fair last year and I'm looking forward to seeing whether or not I find anything nice at this year's fair. I'm flying to Dublin on Thursday after work and will be at the fair on Friday morning and possibly afternoon, before meeting up with friends and family to celebrate my 40th birthday. 40 years, my goodness how time does fly. Thanks again to Sue for hosting the Sealed Pot Challenge - it made last year's birthday lots of fun and it looks like it'll do the same again this year. I'm not feeling much of an urge to look for anything in particular though - kind of feeling like I have enough stuff at the moment. So I'll go along and enjoy looking at everything and really enjoy the feeling of knowing I have the money to get something if I want to.  

My third pot from last year, by the way, was an unmitigated disaster. I don't think I managed to get more than two five euro notes into it at the same time at all, or keep anything in it for more than a few weeks. Still want to try it again next year though. And I will seal up my pot again tomorrow and off we go again. Along with my 50c pot, of course - I am really pleased with how that one went. So 50c pieces for moving and the big pot for something nice for my birthday - possibly not at the same place next year though, a lot will depend on whether or not I manage to find a new job and move next year. Watch this space.

If you'd like to join in with the Sealed Pot Challenge for 2015, head on over of SFT's blog to put your name down. See you there!

Sunday cooking

Still struggling a bit to get things under control but today has so far been a pretty good day. The first day this week that I was able to just sleep until I woke up (so that typically, even after waking and going back to sleep twice, when I was finally awake it was still only half-nine). I'm fighting a bad cough though, so really wanted to take it easy and sleep as long as possible.

I stayed in bed for a couple of hours and read a few chapters. I've done this a few times now and I think I'm going to make it my new Sunday morning routine. Wake when I'm finished sleeping and then read one chapter of each of two books. At the moment I'm reading "Das Große Los" by Meike Winnemuth - a German journalist who won half a million on Who Wants to be a Millionaire and spent a year travelling the world, living for a month  at a time in a different city. It's a lovely read and lends itself well to reading a chapter at a time. This morning I read July, which she spent in London. And when I was finished that, I picked up "Tackling Depression" by Ian Birthistle and finished reading the chapter I must have started months ago. So for the next five weeks or so, I'm going to aim to read one chapter each of those two - I'm taking the fact that I have exactly five chapters left in each of them as a sign.

After reading, I lay for a while, wondering if I might doze off again but that didn't seem to be happening and despite wanting to take it very easy, in the hopes of knocking this cough on the head before it turns into a full-on cold, I had a lot of things to do and felt more of an urge to get up and do some of them. First up, the ironing. A fried came around yesterday and very kindly put up curtain rails in my sitting room. It took hours, the rails I bought and attempted to hang years ago were not going to work, in his opinion so I just took the advice of someone far more experienced in DIY than I am and we headed off to the local DIY centre to see what we could find. Got rails, a decent ladder and some LED bulbs - my seven bulb light in the sitting room has had one bulb after another die in the last couple of months and I was just waiting for the last one to go before getting new ones. Since we were there, I went ahead and got a few - they're pricey enough (although nearly the same price as the older style energy saving ones at this stage) so I just go four and will get the rest at the end of the month. My friend, T. being far more particular about things than I am, insisted on finding some way to tighten the shades on the light as well. It hasn't particularly bothered me that they hung a bit loose but I have to admit that it does look nicer now. Anyway, after a lot of work I finally have curtains rails hanging in my sitting room. But the curtains I got a while back from another friend who was leaving town need to be ironed - I hung one, just to see what it was like and although I could put them all up, telling myself I'd iron them soon, at this stage I've waited so long than I know it's better to do the thing properly once and for all. I have a mountain of other stuff to iron as well.

Since I had so much ironing to do I got up and immediately got stuck in to it. Or not. Nope, instead I headed into the kitchen and started doing one thing, then another and ended up spending the best part of two hours there. But, finally, I am sort of caught up on my vegetables. I have thrown out a shameful amount of food since I started getting the box delivered every week but I'm slowly getting the hang of it. So, today I used up the turnip, most of the Chinese cabbage and a couple of the carrots that were delivered this week, along with all of the potatoes I had on hand and half an onion. I've made cabbage rolls and they're just waiting now to be put into the oven when I want dinner.
I've also chopped up and sauteed two leeks that were just about on their last legs, along with the other half of the onion and some lardons. I'll use that tomorrow in a big quiche. I have a LOT of eggs to use up, too. I have a small amount of Chinese cabbage left, as well, and I'll either add that to the quiche, or keep it and make colcannon when I get my veggie box delivered on Thursday. I'd adjusted my order so that I'll just get eggs every second week now and every other week, I'll get potatoes. At the moment my fridge is looking in pretty good shape. I still have a Chinese cabbage from a couple of weeks ago, celeriac, plenty of carrots and two leeks from this week. So I'll have to have a think about all of that. I really want to do carrot and kidney bean burgers again soon. Realistically I'm not going to use the celeriac in anything other than soup, so I might make a big pot and freeze some of it perhaps. But for now, I'm happy to feel like things are coming under control, dinner's ready to go, the washing up has all been done (except the dish that the cabbage rolls are in) and I've been sat down for about an hour at this stage. That means it must be time to do the ironing!