Wild and wet

This has been the first day in ages that I've not been over the door - except, of course, when I took some paper out to the recycling bin in the later afternoon and paused in the rain to take this photo of the dark house with the dining room lights on - and the light on the stairs, shining into our bathroom via the partition windows. (I suspect the bathroom, like the kitchen, was an add-on after the house had been built for some 10 years.) Anyway, what with Things To Do and the foul weather - torrential rain and high winds - made a nonsense of any ideas of going for a walk if I didn't want a house full of wet clothes. So I feel at once tired and frowsty and a tad discouraged ...

So what needed doing? You might snigger if I told you that actually my first task after washing up breakfast was to clean up the two candlesticks on the windowsill, throwing out the stubs and scraping off the worst of the wax that had trickled down the candlestick. I discovered the efficacy of a bowl of boiling water for the final clean - the candlesticks came from Ikea and are made of some mysterious silver-coloured metal that holds the heat for ages, melting the residue and making it easy to wipe off.

That done, I had a fortifying coffee and then got stuck into the packing, made more trying by the knowledge that we won't have our own car just to throw things into. I've gone for a small suitcase and a similar size of squashy bag from Rohan that is wonderful for organising things in different pockets, as well as having two shoulder straps hidden in the outer casing to transform it into a rucksack. I'm sure I've left out something vital ... but I packed a book.

After that I sort of gave up; I fell asleep reading a magazine about festive food, then wakened enough to have a stab at regaining a safe position in Duolingo so that I'm not demoted on Monday (I'm actually getting quite good at the Italian, even if it looks as if I'm only interested in my ranking). I did some Pilates exercises, ending with a 40-second elbow plank, to make me feel I'd done something, and that was that. We finished the evening of watching a really old-fashioned episode of Endeavour, with Morse and others snow-bound in a deserted hotel in the darkness ... the classic setting of isolation and mystery. 

And now I'm off. I may well be rather terse for a few days, unless the weather puts the tin lid on everything...