The pitter-patter of tiny beads

Can you hear it? There it goes again the pitter-patter of tiny beads. I make beaded jewellery and I drop a lot of beads. I drop teeny tiny seed beads on the wooden floor of the study at 88. Actually I exaggerate.....it's cheap laminate flooring but I can dream. When a bead falls it goes pitter....usually closely followed by another bead...patter. It pisses me off. The wood ('bear with'....are you a Miranda fan?) is littered with beads. I am fast approaching crunch time. Crunch crunch crunch (ooh what a lovely word..'crunch') as I then squash said seed beads underfoot.

Can you hear it? There it goes again thud and then a slightly lighter thud. I drop big beads too, usually followed by a bounce and then a long roll as the bead disappears never to be seen again under the drawers. It annoys me.

Of course it's my own fault. It's all down to lack of preparation you see. If I got out the beads I needed to begin with; if I cleared my tray and laid out its special velvet cloth (to prevent bouncing and rolling); if I gave the whole process some forethought and was much more methodical I wouldn't have bead spillage.

The other day I looked at the perspex box, full of thousands and thousands of pale blue, lime green, pillar box red, bright orange and canary yellow seed beads, teetering on the edge of the window sill, with its lid half on, half off. I thought I really must move that box to safer ground as wouldn't it be awful if the box were to hop off its precarious perch and drop to its laminated death. Lots of pitter-pattering would ensue I mused. And then I forgot about it. Actually I couldn't be bothered to move it. I couldn't be arsed to find another safer place for it.

My little girl and boy rather like the fact that the floor is covered in beads. They regard any little jewels found as their own glimmering booty and secrete them away into their own little treasure boxes. Plastic red shiney beads become precious rubies and cheap metal charms transform into gold and silver. I have nice classy beads too I promise! My husband is very patient. Occasionally he loses that calm acceptance and vacuums the whole lot up......hundreds of beads all lost forever.

Still I suppose I'll never change. I'm impatient and impetuous. The jewellery always does get made in the end. As long as there are more beads in their little storage boxes  than on the floor, that's the important thing.........

I got up clumsily from my desk the other day. The swivel chair I guess just swivelled that bit too much. My elbow caught the perspex box full of blue, green, orange, red and yellow seed beads. Lots of pitter-pattering, pitter-pattering, pitter-pattering did indeed ensue. I closed the study door and went downstairs.

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Do not covet thy neighbour's woodpile

Men and their wood. When we moved into 88 we installed a woodburning stove. It's warm, it's cosy, it's wonderful. In this snowy period it's a joy to snuggle into home. It creates a welcoming mood, a comforting ambience and it keeps you warm.


A bit more drying needed

I noticed a small but discernable change in my husband that first spring after we had the stove: he started to hoard and stack wood. To the uninitiated in the art of burning wood in a stove, you have to burn dry firewood. Dry, dry dry wood. The man who installed the stove told us to burn dry; the man who built the fireplace urged us to burn dry and the lovely chimney sweep who comes every year is evangelical in his instruction to burn dry. Apparently wet wood ruins your flue. I won't get technical but I understand the tar build-up is ruinous with wet. The advice is stack your logs outside and let the wind blow through.

My husband, or David as I call him, took to stacking his wood with consumate ease. If it involved chopping down a tree (we have quite a big garden), cutting it up....any excuse to buy a chainsaw....and then stacking all the better.  Word got round work; he's now the employee of choice to receive any felled wood. We go for a walk and the angst is huge that he can't physically carry home all the broken branches.

I have a theory that it harks back to the old pioneering woodsman's instinct to provide for his family; to get the supplies safely stored before the harsh winter sets in. I've chatted with female friends who have stoves and it's the same with their partners.

Of course the need to build your log pile is best satisfied if you cut the wood yourself but it's still partially sated, although to a lesser extent, if you buy the stuff, kiln-dried and have it delivered to your door. Have you noticed that a whole new logging industry of kiln-dried, naturally-dried, dried-anyway-you-can-imagine dried has grown up? Even if the logs are delivered to your door, packed in plastic bags, you can still build and admire your logpile.

I have to admit that I scoffed at this firewood imperative at first. But then a few years ago I got the jam-making and pickling bug. My need was to have jar upon jar of homemade preserves and jam in my pantry....well I don't actually have a pantry just a shelf or two in the garage. It's that same principle, urging you to get your supplies ready for the harsh winter. Pickling is my equivalent to chainsawing and my pantry is my proverbial woodpile.

But it's got worse. David is away with work at the moment and so it falls to me alone to provide for the family in this cold weather. It's true David went away secure in the knowledge that his diligence in building that woodpile high would keep his family warm til his return from hunting elk in the high country....sorry from his business trip. But still the feeling of providing for ones family is intoxicating.  I haven't gone so far as to chop down a tree and anyway that wouldn't do...it would be wet wood but David has left me a supply of used and ..yes..dry wooden pallets to supplement the logs from the woodpile. With my little faithful electric saw, or my breadknife as I affectionately call it, beside me, I chop away. And I love it. Don't tell anyone but you can call me Virginia aka 'pioneering woodswoman of the Cheshire Plain' and I won't flinch. The higher my pile of firewood, the better. Haven't quite moved on to the plaid shirt yet though.

And it's got even worse. I went for a short walk yesterday and found myself casting a sly and critical glance at someone's very big pile of logs outside their homestead. Dear lord - do not covet thy neighbour's woodpile or for that matter their pickled onions and rhubarb jam stacked high in their lovely pantry. I'm off now to chop, lay and light.

Rubber band sculptures

Opened my front door at 88 the other day to find a lonely rubber band on the doorstep. "Ah..the postman has been then" I muttered.
Ever seen a lonely red rubber band lying there on the pavement? I have and over the last year or two my children and I have picked up every red abandoned rubber band that we came across. With our stretchy booty we have made a rubber band sculpture which not only looks cool, it bounces as well.
My husband is aghast that I pick up things from the pavement and even worse that I encourage our children to do likewise. Believe me sometimes it takes us quite a long time to get from A to B as we wade through and pick up those pinky, reddy bands used so glaringly by the post office and dropped so casually by some postmen and women.
Alas to our disappointment the supply seems to have dried up recently. The rubber band I discovered on my doorstep was not a familiar and comforting red but an ordinary pale manila brown. Still we now have the bug again and have a little collection going to make a companion ball to our red one. Will it bounce any higher I wonder?
Indeed, my children and I have become so used to tidying up public floors that we have extended the hunt to hair bobbles. You start looking and you will see the world is full of lost hair bobbles. The local public swimming pool being the number one location. I wash them, dry them and pop them in my daughter's hair. It saves a fortune on hair accessories.
Off to collect the children from school soon....better get them to wash their hands as soon as they get in!

Where to sledge?

We've had snow at 88 like most of the UK. With snow and with children comes the need to sledge. But where to sledge? We've lived at 88 for nearly 6 years now and although we've had two previous winters where the snow fell thick and deep, the children were quite young and were happy being pulled along in the sledge and pushed down a gentle slope at the back of the house. But at the grand old ages of 7 and 5 they demand steeper and longer slopes. We are not from this area. I'm a Yorkshire lass, who got her passport stamped and came to live over the Pennines....but we won't talk about that..... and my husband comes from 20 minutes up the road. But sledging is an on-your- doorstep pursuit. You can't get in the car and drive 20 minutes up the road. You have to trudge from your house.

It made me ponder the fact that you can never feel really at home in a place until you know the best places to sledge. By that you should know the little gentle slopes, you should know the short but steep routes and you should know the black sledge runs. Even if you don't have children yourself, you should know where to direct your younger kith and kin or indeed yourself in times of deep snow.

I was brought up on a farm and I knew where to go to sledge depending on the level of adrenalin rush I craved. My husband's family have lived in the same area for generations so he sledged where his mum sledged where her father and mother sledged where their parents sledged. We felt at home and I think our parents felt at home.

We are lucky here at 88 - we have a bloody big hill in front of the house, known affectionately by us locals as The Low (took me 5 years to discover that) but where to go on that huge hill? OK I could have asked a local mum at school but that would have spoilt the fun. Off we crunched. We soon found a spot...but then a friendly girl, walking her dog who clearly had fond memories of local toboggan runs, pointed us in the direction of better slopes for speed and excitement a few fields further up the hill. And Reader, we found the perfect run - quiet, fairly steep and with tufty grass popping through near the base of the run so that mum was happy noone would smack into the  dry stone wall at the very bottom.

We came home all very cold and wet as is de rigeur when sledging and I felt I'd settled into the place that little bit more.