Ezekial and young Raphael Dubb...

... Have bought a boat and seriously
Intend to take the thing to sea.

Those lines appear in one of the books I happened upon this afternoon, while compltely rearranging the house. This particular book (which also contains the line: "And Raphael Dubb they put to bed, for he was wandering in the head." - which rather amuses me) is The Tyger Voyage by Richard Adams and Nicola Bayley. It's really wonderful, and I'm so glad I have it to share with my kids; it was one of my very favourites.

I found another of my childhood faves too: Tubby and the Poo-Bah. That's a brilliant book, and Missy-moo jumped straight into it when I produced it in triumph. ;-)

Anyhoo, the reason for the findingness of the books of writing and pictures... We visited yesterday with friends, who have a new house - one rather nicely appointed. While people who come to our house go ooh aah (the same as we did when we first saw it), one becomes a bit too accustomed to what one has. And also peeved with the lovely enormous back room looking horrid and small because it's crammed with children's toys and rubbish and mess and general stuff. Despite that, seeing these friends' house just started me thinking, and mrs tsuken and I both liked the thunks I thought up. Essentially, we moved a bookshelf, and lots of cds and other sundry wossnames out of what was a kind of study (woefully underused), and that became the kids' playroom - so all their stuff disappeared from out the back. That enabled more rearranging of dvd cabinets and bookshelves - and TVs - with the big one now out the back in the enormous room, and the little one out the front in the not-so-big room. Everything looks so much bigger. I didn't take before photos, so you don't have a comparison, but I just wanted to document it anyway. So this is the front room. Soooo much nicer with the smaller TV, and without the huge DVD cabinets.

(Edit: you do have a wee bit of a comparison in fact: here is a corner of the room, showing the big telly, and the glass table thing - as opposed to the wooden corner unit that you can see in today's pic.)

I is a happy chappy. (Larger room.)

Also had a run today, to help ease the calves, which were screaming bloody murder on account of Friday's big trail run. ;-) I decided, given that primary purpose, to take it really easy: not push the pace, let myself go slowly ... So I averaged 5:30/km, which I don't regard as that slow. It was nice to see that pace despite letting myself go slow, and overall running a bit easy, as if I could keep up that pace for long enough (I don't know how realistic it is ... but it did feel pretty good, despite some good-going hills), it would give me a sub-4 hour marathon, which would please me. So I think that could be where to aim.