Too hot – part three

Here we go – the last part of my blog catch up!  I’m still too hot but I’ve got a fan (see below) and I’ve realised that sometimes, you just need to sit in the garden and knit instead of rushing about in the heat.  The rain and the cold weather will be here soon enough and I can get all the jobs done then!

 

Not so small daughter returned home safely from China last Monday and has had a whale of a time.  She stayed in Rizhao, a city on the coast about 4 hours from Beijing airport by bullet train, and spent her days at the university with Chinese students who were doing a similar course to the one that most of not so small daughter’s group were doing.  She and her friend were the only two from a different department and they’d been able to go as there were spare spaces – certainly very lucky for them!

A lot of what they were doing were cultural activities so she has come home with lots of samples of calligraphy, pottery painting and other crafts.  They also went tea-picking and because they were close to a beach, had a day out at the beach where she got bitten by an unknown bug and had to visit a local pharmacy for help as she has localised reactions to bug bites.  Even in our technical age, smiling and pointing still gets you a long way and after showing the pharmacist her bug bite, not so small daughter was given something that turned out to be exactly the right ointment to help it heal quickly.

There’s something known as the “Great Firewall of China” in terms of technology and you can’t use Google, WhatsApp or many other Western apps in China unless you buy an e-sim and connect to data separately.  For day-to-day use, not so small daughter used the state apps of Alipay and Wechat which allowed her to pay for items and send messages, although we were able to stay in contact with her through WhatsApp as she had a separate sim.  What she also found is that translation apps have developed to the point now where it can keep up with a live conversation so she was able to talk to people through the chat app as long as the app was running and could act as a live translator.  It’s all very clever!

On the last day, they headed back to Beijing before a very early flight the next morning and got to do the thing that not so small daughter had been looking forward to most – visiting the Great Wall of China.  I always think it’s amazing to see a familiar face at a landmark that you’ve only seen in books, magazines or on TV before, but there was our girl with the wall snaking behind her.  Incredible!

This is one of the projects from a craft session they did which not so small daughter has given to me as a yarn project bag – and how fortunate that I have new yarn to put in it!  🙂  (If you missed my last post about my gift from Sarah of Narrative Yarns, you can read it here: Too hot – part two).  The picture is of a farmer feeding geese or ducks: this is typical of peasant or farmer art of the Rizhao region and the little purple tin behind has tea in it.  I’m all sorted!

Astrid was very glad that not so small daughter had brought the suitcase back for her to lie in.  I think she looks like a sardine in a tin that’s just been opened! 🙂

In other pet news, Hattie is spending as much time outdoors as she possibly can and comes home absolutely filthy – we see her rolling in the dust on the drive – but then a few hours after being indoors she’s lovely and clean again.  We’re not quite sure where she’s wiping herself to get all the dirt off but my vacuum cleaner is always very full of hair and dust in a very short space of time when I use it!

Going out with the dog has turned into a bit of a treasure hunt at the moment.  I don’t know what your lawns might be like over the summer but ours has turned brown and crispy (I am not someone who waters the grass), the borders are starting to look more than a little dry, and even out and about the hedgerows are not as lush as they usually are.  The lack of rain is not stopping the nettles or the brambles, of course, but the cleavers in the garden seem to be coming to an end now.  I’m hoping I’ve pulled up enough of them to at least make a dent in what would otherwise be growing next year!

I’ve been looking closely at the hedgerows along the footpaths and there is still life there if you stop to look for it, which makes me very happy.  The cow parsley is still blooming …

blackberries are starting to ripen …

and a neighbour’s conifer tree has produced what look like tiny cones.  I don’t think they’ll grow into anything much bigger, but I don’t think I’d ever stopped to notice these growing before – there’s always something extraordinary in the everyday!

I also spotted this magnificent fungus on a tree …

It’s huge!  I am no fungi expert so I’ve looked it up and it’s a bracket fungus, with common names being “dryad’s saddle” in the UK or “pheasant’s back” in the US and it’s a type of edible mushroom.  I have no intention of eating it just in case I’ve got it wrong, but it does look impressive!

I went to the library yesterday to pick up a book that I’d ordered.  I haven’t been to the library for absolutely years – I still find it hard to concentrate on novels these days: I got out of the habit of reading for pleasure when I was doing my Master’s degree over 10 years ago and it’s never really come back to me.  Every now and again I find a novel that I enjoy but I find myself more drawn to non-fiction these days.  It makes me a bit sad as I used to be a voracious reader and would often come home from the library with five or six books at a time; I think that knitting more is a factor as I can’t knit and read at the same time.  I don’t have a Kindle or other e-reader as I like paper books but I do know that I can use the Kindle app on my laptop and knit – I just can’t do that with a paper book.

Anyway, this is the book I went to collect – I’ve read it before many years ago (it was first published in 1986 and that’s probably about the time I read it) and I wanted to show you because it’s pretty much a brand new book.  It’s called Magic Kingdom For Sale/Sold* by Terry Brooks and I can’t tell you what made me decide I wanted to read it again, but fortunately it was available to order at the library instead of me having to buy it, so that’s what I did.

Oh, the rush of excitement of being one of the first to read a book from the library!  It all came flooding back to me and I was suddenly my much younger self standing in the library of the village where I grew up, ready to load my stack of books into my bike basket and cycle home.  Even reading the book again is taking me back to a time when pretty much all I read was science fiction and fantasy and it took me a lot longer to get out of bed this morning than it usually does!

Also on the theme of the extraordinary in the everyday, the car park at the library was busy so I ended up parking just a little way away in a different section of the car park shared by the medical centre and other nearby shops.  I’ve been using this car park for over 30 years and I have never parked in this particular car park space before – it’s nothing earth-shattering but I like to notice these things!

 

With no sign of the temperature dropping any time soon, I’ve given in and bought a couple of fans so it was lovely to stay in bed for a bit longer reading and being cool.  We don’t have air-conditioning installed as standard in UK houses although there are plenty of companies that will supply units if you want to have one installed.  I haven’t bothered with even a fan up until now as there’s usually been somewhere slightly cooler in the house to sit, but it’s been really stuffy overnight so I decided I should try to do something to improve our sleep quality.  Where the dog sleeps has been hot too despite my best efforts to avoid that, so I thought that he would appreciate a fan as he’s got thick fur.

A friend bought a tower fan recently and I started searching for one of those, but then I spotted these …

It’s a rechargeable fan* and it’s slim enough to fold up and carry around, so perfect for moving to different places around the house even where there isn’t a plug, and it would be also be great for taking away on holiday if you were going somewhere hot.  I often get a sore throat sleeping in an air-conditioned room so this feels like a great solution to that.

It’s 21.3cm high, 17.8cm wide and only 400g in weight – but it packs quite the punch!  Even better, it was less than half the price of the tower fan my friend bought so buying two felt like a bargain!  All the reviews are very positive so although it wasn’t what I was originally looking for, I thought I’d give it a go and I am so pleased that I did.  The fan comes with 62% charge so you can use it straight out of the box (the one in the photo is attached to my power brick and charging – you can even use the fan to charge your phone!) and it has four speed settings.  We’ve got one in the bedroom and the dog has one in the hall, and it’s made it much easier to sleep.  I am a fan convert!

 

Right, that’s it for today and I think I have finally caught up with everything I wanted to tell you!  You think that the days pass by without much to say for them and sometimes they do, but even the day-to-day stuff has a story if you look for it.  I hope the story of your days this week has been a good one! xx

 

 

*These are Amazon links