Miscellaneous

I’m loving time at home. I’ve been cooking, decluttering and organising, and playing around with the camera. I’ve given myself a challenge to use just my 50mm lens for a whole week. I love the clarity of the pictures it takes, but have to get used to moving more when I’m taking photos, rather than just relying on my zoom. I’m also lusting after a full frame body (A Canon 5D mark III), but I think that might be a little while off yet!

While we are on the subject of photography, I have made it my mission these holidays to upskill myself a little. During read and relax hour after lunch I have been watching you tube clips, and reading articles to extend my skill base. So much fun. So much to learn! I’ve also pinned a heap of articles to my pinterest boards photography, and lightroom 101 if you’re interested!

Back in July, Hannah began making a garden diary to enter in a competition for Country Style magazine. She had her eye on the ipad that was the prize. She didn’t win, but she was a finalist, and so she got a mention together with a picture of her work in the December issue. Proud parenting moment!

I’ve made a big quantity of my plum paste this week. We picked the plums on Tuesday morning, and I boiled them up and then sifted out all the pips that afternoon. Wild plums are a lot smaller than the commercially grown varieties, so of course the pips were tiny and there were thousands of them. It took about an hour and a half to remove them all, and it looked like there had been a plum massacre everywhere. I finished the paste on Wednesday, and hopefully we have enough for the year!

As part of my general decluttering effort, I’ve gone through our bookcases, and had a good look at all our books. Anything that we will honestly never read again has gone. Even Country Boy managed to part with probably 20 of his gardening type books (don’t worry he still has at least another 50). The one thing on the shelves that didn’t get culled is our old photo albums. Tell me people, what do you do with your albums? For the last 6 years we have been doing photo books, but before that we had printed pictures (from negatives from our first camera) and put them into whopping great albums that take up heaps of space and collect dust. Our year in Europe has six (!) albums, while four weeks in Malaysia and China have two albums. I don’t want to get rid of them, but they are getting damaged sitting on the shelves accumulating dust. Ideas ploise!!??

I’ve been watching Dawsons’ Creek over the holidays. Long time readers might remember that I have lots of memories associated with watching it. So any hoo, I’ve been watching, and I have to say it is a bit painful. Bad fashion (did we ever dress like that???), ridiculous, unnecessary angst (well I guess it is a teen show so I shouldn’t be surprised). I’m only in the second season. Jack has kissed Joey, confusing her (no surprises there). Besides than she starts going out with Pacey at sometime, I really don’t remember much. Is it worth persevering? Was it really always this bad, or does it get better?

Been decluttering? Know what to do with photo albums? Opinion on Dawson’s Creek? Help a girl out.