Ten on Tuesday: 10 Things in your (purse) handbag

All tucked up! Note the mis-matched shoulder strap borrowed from another bag! And the loose thread on the flap indicating that I’ve already snapped a decorative button off!

And in no particular order…

1. Hand sanitiser
2. Packet of tissues
3. Diary
4. TicTacs
5. Plastic bag (for shopping, restaurant food-storage, or emergency rain hat)
6. Bag-for-life made from recycled plastic bottles
7. Keys (note the tag with my name on and the fabric frog!)
8. My essentials pouch containing lip gloss/mascara, perfume, moisturiser, hairbrush and PILLS!
9. Walking stick.
10. Purse (wallet) on a chain.

ToT: 10 Things to Do Instead of Watching TV

I don’t watch a vast amount of TV these days (health permitting – more ill = more TV to break the boredom) so I’d like to think this list should be easy!

1. Knit, crochet, sew, bead, … I could have listed these separately, but where’s the challenge in that?
2. Listen to an audiobook (which you can, of course do at the same time as crafting)
3. Garden. Even if it’s a dry plastic pot perched on a windy balcony with one barely-clinging-to-life geranium in it, it’s still gardening!
4. Bird watching.  Again, you can bird watch from practically anywhere and sometimes you get to see falcons nesting in city centres or geese flying over suburbia.
5. Star-gazing.  Although this is best undertaken in Autumn or Spring (longer nights, but not so cold you get frost-bite) and with minimal light pollution, even without optimal conditions you can still pick out the brightest stars and even a planet or two.  My favourite are meteor storms!
6. Listen to the radio.  My personal choices are BBC Radio 5live (primarily a news and sports station), Radio 4 (spoken word for drama, documentaries and comedy) and 6Music (erm … music, really!)
7. Play Facebook games.  What?  Don’t look at me like that.  I’ve always been a gamer.
8. Watch stuff online.  Well, it’s not really TV, is it?
9. If you are able, go for a walk. In the winter this can constitute making out onto the back step and in again for me, but I do like a nice wander/meander.
10. Fire-gazing.  You don’t need a fire, or even a candle, but sometimes your brain just needs to park up for a bit while you gaze of into the middle distance.  To be honest, I’ve found myself doing this while I’m allegedly watching TV, so that’s why I suggested it!

Woah, that was tougher than I thought!  Sorry for the lack of photos this week but I finished this list at 00:20 on Tuesday.  Oops!

ToT: 10 Things to Bring on a Camping Trip

My parents used to take my brother and me camping quite a lot when we were younger but I haven’t been under canvas in a very long time.
My list assumes you’ve got the basics like a tent, cooking equipment, a rucksack and a sleeping bag.

1. Head torch.  Hands-free to allow you to work in the dark and essential for those midnight trips to the loo!
2. A small crochet or knitting project.  I know it didn’t really need to be said since I think most people reading this would have packed that first, right?
3. Plastic bags (various sizes).  Large ones for shoes and clothes, medium sized ones for sandwiches and tiny ones for toiletries, these always come in handy.
4. A repair kit.  My lives in a mint tin and is permanently packed and ready to go.  I have velcro, webbing, a lighter, a small crochet hook (not just for crochet!), plaited thread, a blunt and sharp needle, some safety pins and some spare buttons.
5. A mircrofibre towel/cloth.  Essential for drying damp hair but so useful for rolling damp laundry in to squeeze excess moisture out, speeding up the drying process.
6. A small battery-powered radio.  I have one with FM, AM and LW so I can keep in contact with the world at large and the cricket in particular!
7. A large square/rectangle of cotton fabric.  It can be a sarong, a dress, head covering, shawl, a windbreak, sunshade, shelter, picnic blanket …
8. Loo roll. ’nuff said.
9. Maps.  Whether the good old paper kind or new fangled GPS it’s kind of nice to know where you are or where you’re going!
10. A little luxury.  It could be your favourite moisturiser, a cuddly toy or a games console, but I always take something less-than utilitarian!

ToT: 10 Things You Like About Where You Live

Although I moan a lot about where I live, I like this positive spin on it! I’m taking “where I live” not only to mean my immediate location, but the UK at large.

1. The landscape.  I love living where, if I stand on tip toes and lean in the right direction, I can see craggy hills and moorland from my window.
2. The climate and the weather.  There’s a reason British people are obsessed with the weather and that’s because there’s so much of it!
3. Accessibility.  I can be in Manchester city centre in 20 minutes, Leeds in not much longer than that, London in 4 hours (hahahahahaha – sorry, joke.  You’re lucky if you can catch a train that isn’t delayed)  but I can also be in the Lake District in less than 2 hours and in the Pennine hills in fewer than 30 minutes.
4. Greenery.  At this time of year, in the middle of the town centre, you can see trees and flowers.  In the winter there are the ever-changing moors in which clouds skid over purple heather blackened in patches from the summer fires.
5. I get horses clip-clopping past my front door on a fairly regular basis!  (It’s a semi-rural area, and they are mounted horses – not wild).
6. The mobile library stops at the top of my street – gotta love free books that are delivered to your door!
7. You can’t watch Emmerdale, Holyoaks or Coronation Street (three soaps) without saying “Oh, he lives one street away.” , “Hey, isn’t that my hairdresser’s cousin” or “I went to school with them!”
8. Cricket.  I keep telling myself I’ll go to a local match but I can never find the fixtures list and it’s all the way over the other side of the village and ….
9. Community – my hairdresser and I went to the same secondary school (actually, we only missed each other by one year!), you go to the local supermarket and you actually know who these people are and you occasionally find three neighbours who seem to care!
10. History.  This place is jam-packed with history; ancient and modern, local and “foreign”.  There are Roman roads, stone circles, industrial revolution, political history and everything in between – and that’s just in my local town!

Huh. That was more difficult than I’d thought.  It’s always easy to see things to like about places you visit but more difficult to see the positive around you (plus we Britons have a tendency to moan!)

ToT: 10 Ways to Enjoy Summer

Erm. I realise that last week I promised a post between then and now, but I’ve either been rushed-off-me-feet-busy or ill.  I haven’t even uploaded my holiday photos from my camera yet, so it may be a while!

Anyway, on to this weeks Ten on Tuesday.  I suppose how you enjoy summer depends on how well you and summer get along.  For me, the sunshine and warmer temperatures are fantastic, but the neighbourhood kids being off school and the hayfever? Not so much!  So I’ve done my best to provide ways for all people to enjoy the summer (for those in the southern hemisphere quietly shivering, maybe you can file these away for a few months?)

1. Read (or listen to audiobooks) outside. With longer and warmer (ha!) days I love taking a book outside and trying to block out the noise of lawn mowers! I even bought some tinted reading glasses for the purpose!

   

2. Craft items out of cotton.  It’s probably just me, but working with cotton in winter makes my hands ache.
3. Sewing!  I love sewing in summer because cute summer tops take less time to make than fiddly winter items. Plus it’s the perfect rainy-day activity.
4. Improve your salad repertoire.  I’m afraid to say that most of my salads consist of lettuce, tomato, cucumber plus whatever else I have on hand that can be eaten raw.  I’m trying to expand my cold horizons.
5. Defrost the freezer.  Sounds like hard work but if it’s roasting hot, you get cooled down and it only takes a couple of hours!
6. Find some (large-ish) body of water and be by it.
7. Pamper yourself.  My hobbit feet get an airing most of the year around but I tend to take better care of them in the summer months.
8. Turn off the computer/TV.  My excuse is that it’s too hot to work on a hot laptop in the heat!
9. Bat watching.  I love watching the little bats scoop insects from the twilight sky from my back door.
10. Pop an antihistamine and crack open a window.  Even my arachnophobia has a little holiday at this time of year for the sake of a cooling breeze.

ETA – so I clicked “publish” instead of “schedule” but it’s Tuesday in Australia, so what the hell, right?