This month I have been mostly...

Doing:

I had a couple of weeks holiday from work. I painted my fence, had my first day browsing the shops since lockdown, walked on the beach, dyed my hair, defrosted the fridge (don't know why I didn't get round to that in lockdown!), went to the Chinese supermarket in Dundee, went to Anstruther, and spent time with my brother and his family who were visiting.

Sadly a family friend passed away (although she had reached a good age, it was still sad to hear). My dad and I went to her street to stand with other friends and colleagues and watch the funeral car drive off.

That night there was the most spectacular lightning storm I've ever seen. As I drove back from my parents' house the sky was flashing brightly with lightning every few seconds, and I continued to watch this show until 1.30am. There were huge booms of thunder that seemed to make the house shake under me, and the most intense rain I've ever heard (and being in a flat-roofed house I did worry a bit!). I was awoken again at about 5am by the storm continuing, and watched and listened to the storm for a few hours more until it subsided. Fife is not usually prone to a lot of flooding, but this storm was of a scale that has not been seen in centuries! There was flooding in my town, the surrounding villages, and in the next town the cars in the hospital car park were floating about. My work was flooded but I was on holiday anyway!

I decided to book a few online events to keep me occupied at weekends, one of which was the St Hilda's Crime Fiction Weekend, and the other was Hue and Cry's Live from Lockdown concert. Both were great! I also watched some of the Edinburgh Book Festival. I'm looking at booking some other things to give me stuff to look forward to.

I got back into the habit of taking a daily walk, and have been listening to Melissa Harrison's podcast The Stubborn Light of Things while doing so.

Going back to work after my holidays has given me a chance to show off some of the clothes that I made during lockdown!

Reading:

I've been really getting back into reading this month! I finished reading Sujata Massey's Perveen Mistry books, then read all of the Aunty Lee books by Ovidia Yu. 

I finished reading Sarah Hilary's Tastes Like Fear, which I'd had on the go for a while. I read The Skeleton Road by Val McDermid, and have the next few Karen Pirie books lined up to read soon. 

I read Before the Coffee Gets Cold, by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, which was an interesting and quirky little book, and The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon.

My older nephew is hooked on reading the Harry Potter books, so I'm having fun trying to think of books for him to read! I gave him a big pile of my Enid Blyton books, so now I have space to store all the new books I've been buying for myself!

Buying:

I got some more jigsaws from the charity shops, so I really need to get on with finishing my current one! I also got more secondhand bedding to make clothes from. 

I ordered some fabric from Spoonflower to make a face mask to go with my Mary Quant style dress, and once I've made that I'll be able to go suitably attired to the Mary Quant exhibition at the V&A in Dundee and the Mid Century exhibition at Dovecot in Edinburgh!

But mostly I've just been buying yet more books!

And, finally, a demonstration that my personal style has not changed in any way in over 40 years!