SCARBOROUGH

We went on a coach trip to Scarborough. So did everyone else it seems! Not only was everyone from the north east of England there, but all the "motor scooter clubs" in England were visiting too.

There were donkeys being ridden on the beach, Children paddling, queues at every fish and chip shop, billowing banks of mist rolling down from the cliff top and people absolutely everywhere trying to get some sunshine when it broke through.

The Grand Hotel is a little tatty on the outside but still has very grand Victorian features and an amazingly commanding position on the top of the cliff.

We crossed over the bridge after visiting the Museum which houses the remains of Gristhorpe Man http://www.rotundamuseum.co.uk/rotunda-museum/our-story/The%20Gristhorpe%20Man

The weather stayed fine and we explored the promenade, the shopping area and the back streets before returning to the Grand for a well earned drink with the motor scooter riders in the bar.

Much of the Victorian architecture survives and space on top of the cliff is highly prized. Buildings are wedged together and parking is extremely limited so we were glad we had chosen to travel by coach for the day out. Dozens of motorists got parking tickets along the promenade. They all seemed to have misread a parking sign saying "Three Hours Parking between 5pm and 9am".

Cheers Gillian

SO MUCH SUNSHINE

The spell of lovely weather continues. Clouds go over now and then but the sun soon comes out again. This fuzzy pic shows a black sqirrel in C's garden. She has black ones and grey ones and some blackish ones which must be the offspring. Occasionally she has a little deer visiting but I have never been there for that.

The new doors are on. This is the new front door and there are matching ones for french windows. The sun streams in them all for most of the day. The weather has helped the building go ahead steadily and each day brings it all forward. We are on the enhancing bits now. The plastering is done. The electrics are finished and the lights are all up...there are a lot of switches which will take a while to get used to. They are to enable the lights to be turned off and on at both doors. The window is back in and the tiling is getting done...beautifully.

The knitting is on its third creation. The previous two having been too small. The yarn is now blended with some mohair I bought in Tunisia a couple of years ago and haven't found a use for yet and the whole thing is on larger needles. It feels and looks good and is now up to the armholes.

The shed roof is going on today and the building inspector called unannounced but could find no faults. He has a reputation for being deliberately nit-picking. He boasted to us when we handed in our plans that he could always find something wrong!

But nothing can spoil this. I have always wanted a tiled porch and now I've got one. I was going to wait till it was finished and grouted before I took a picture but I'm so thrilled with it you can all have a look now!

Cheers Gillian

On Top Of Things

The weekend before last was lovely and sunny and so we joined a walk from Middleton-in-Teesdale. we climbed steeply up the Hudeshope valley into the old lead mining areas. These hillsides are heavily scarred with "hushes" and "dumps". The hushes form deep vees in the slopes where the soil was washed away from the lead ore and the waste dumps make the rest of the landscape look very lumpy. The double line across the middle of the picture is the dry stone walls on either side of the road. The mineshops still remain but in ruins. Ponies were so valued that six lived in the stables on the ground floor of this one at Coldberry and 42 miners lived on the next floor up. They were easier to come by!

The roof went on this week and it is all beginning to look less like a building site and more like a building.

I have finished spinning and knitting the merino tops I bought. They have become a large shopping bag. It spent a few days being just that, because I have never felted in the washing machine before and as I have a front loader, I needed to read the manual to work out the pause mechanism. Also, after such a lot of spinning and knitting I was a bit worried that it would be a disaster.

But it worked. It is now out in the sun drying, with newspapers inside to keep the shape right.

So I have embarked on spinning the blue-faced-leicester tops. There is a mixture of natural shades and I have spun and plied them randomly and am knitting them into a jumper. I always hope I shall look like the model in the picture, when I wear my version.

I shall spin more today so that I have some knitting to take south to visit C. I haven't been far from home for a few months and it will be fun to get out on the road again. DJ will stay and keep an eye on the cat and the builders and I shall do the same next week when he goes off visiting.

We are keeping up with our resolution to go to the gym three time a week and although I'm much the same size and weight, I feel fitter and see no reason to give it up. We shall also walk more again as the weather improves but I excuse myself in wet weather by complaining that it is hard to see in the rain when you are wearing glasses.

I don't like wind either.

Cheers for now

Gillian

TODAYS TOP PICS

Off to the seaside! It was the only way to play the day because the weather was just so gorgeous. We have to make the most of it "oop north". We headed for Seaton Carew, which is our nearest seaside. The tide was the furthest out we have ever seen it. I presume that this is the spring tide effect, linked to the moon being nearest to the earth last weekend. We had to walk for ages to get to the sea and things were exposed that we have never seen before. The beach was enormous. This is the view, after we had walked for an hour, back towards Seaton Carew.

This is the view of the sand under the water at my feet. I was wearing gumboots so that I could paddle about and this was the pattern of ripples under about two inches of slack tide near the water's edge. I loved the pattern.

At the jetty to the north of the entry to Teesport, an enormous object had been uncovered. No idea what it was, but it was about eight feet long and solid rusty metal.

We had a great lunch at the Staincliffe and then came home to the start of a new roof.

Great stuff all round.

Cheers Gillian

SPRING IS SPRUNG

The first lamb can be a good indicator of spring, but the first foal is my "sure thing" for spring. This photo is a bit blurry because the foal was wary and although another member of the family followed us on our walk, hoping for more carrots, the baby stayed safely back. We were walking with the Durham Guided Walks group and this little cob came as far as it could and managed to get about four carrots from DJ.

We haven't walked much lately. It's not easy to walk whilst wearing glasses, in the rain, but the fine weather got us on track again. A lovely walk around the riverside in Durham on Saturday was followed by this trek along old railway lines on Sunday. In fact, part of it was along the first passenger railway line in the world. Before steam engines, ponies hauled the coal and mineral-ore wagons along these early lines.

Coal mines were very plentiful in the area around us. Here is a major subsidence on the "right of way" near our Sunday walk, which has recently appeared. There was a coal mine just up the hill from this point and this "sink" is probably over an underground tunnel. There was also evidence of an underground fire shown as blackened soot layers in the red clay.

Today was such gorgeous weather that the Botanic Gardens in Durham beckoned. It was a tad early for the daffodils and azaleas but we shall return in a couple of weeks. The ponds were full of frogs and spawn. The trees and bushes were at bud burst and the sun shone quite warmly on us as we ate our lunch outside.

Tom cats are around. Tigger is in bushy tail mode to make herself look more alarming to any unwanted visitor as she heads for the door.

She is getting a new cat flap in a couple of weeks. The building is on schedule and the weather continues to be kind to us.

Cheers Gillian

NO MORE BORING BUILDING BLOGS

Well not for a while anyway. I went to the AGM of my W.I. group last night. There is always a small competition and last night it was "a limerick using a local place name". I picked on Brough, because even though it's not very close, it is considered by those who live up in Teesdale as being just over the top of the next hill. I chose it because it is pronounced Bruff and is easy to rhyme. I got started well but stalled at the last line, then DJ came up with the winner. So off I trotted with my plate of supper ( bag of Cadbury's chocolate drops), my donated prize for the raffle (left over box of Thornton's chocs from xmas), "my" limerick and my calendar of events for next year all neatly typed up...AND...came home with a bunch of tulips for the limerick and nothing else. A successful night.
So here is the limerick.
There was a fine lady from Brough
Who motored round town in the buff
They said it was rude
To drive in the nude
Removing one's hat is enough!

And here are the winning tulips. And some knitting. This is for the felted/fulled bag and is well under way. I haven't done anything like it before so it is proceeding swiftly while my enthusiasm lasts.

Tigger loves it too and has just chased the needles around the room. You may have noticed that there has not been much mention of the photography lessons of late. My enthusiasm for that has waned. I find the teacher a bit tedious and we seem to have done all the topics I like and are now working through topics he likes. His examples are black and white classics from the sixties and seventies when he was at the height of his career, and stunning though they are I'm learning little from them. The other students are helpful and good company and we get a great deal out of looking at all of one another's work.

This afternoon is "Tradesmen", even though it includes tradeswomen and should really have been called "Tradespersons" or simply just "Trades". I am still irked by a general lack of caring about this sort of reference to male/female terms since I came home from Oz. Before that it was "Portraits" and although I have some good ones of both, I shan't post them because I haven't permission.

I realise that I don't want to be a photographer, I don't want to walk around with a large camera hanging round my neck and I'm annoyed by teachers who are badly organised and bumbling.

Off to photography for the penultimate class this afternoon. Back to watercolour painting next term.

Cheers Gillian

LOVELY WEATHER FOR IT!

I managed to finish enough squares to complete the throw at last. The yellow and green ones and some of the brown ones were hand spun and then dyed with plants from the Raby House garden. The rest are left over wools from the stash. There is a wide variety of fibres so washing will have to be done by hand in the bath. Then I crocheted a picot edging around the outside and finished it off with a press.

Tigger loves it too! I was keen to get it finished because I had spun some tops on the new wheel and had identified a "felted" bag, on the net, to knit and full. I challenged myself to get one project finished before I started the next. I'm now halfway through knitting the bag so I shall blog it next.

The weather continued to be fine. Very cold, but fine and the workers were able to keep going on the building. Here's another view of builder's cleavage. Totally accidental on his part and mine. At least I photographed it from a distance. I'm not sure if it is the same builder or whether they are taking it in turns and NO I haven't studied it in close-up. The concrete is poured, the insulation laid and the top layer of concrete is drying off now.

There was only a slight hiccup when they found an old lead gas pipe with a distinct smell of gas coming from it. The first plumber came round but was too busy to take up all the floorboards because he had a boiler in pieces on someone else's floor, so his mate came round and fixed it later. Fortunately only one floorboard needed to be lifted and none of our appliances were attached to the old pipe so it could safely and easily be cut and capped.

The whole space is still looking smaller than I expected and the walls won't help. Still it always was called the SNUG.

Cheers Gillian