Lavender

For the past few years I haven't harvested my lavender which is a shame as the plant it very big and yields a lot of flowers. I was walking past it the other day when I had finished hanging the washing out...on one of the few dry days this month...and noticed that the flowers had closed and were starting to fall off the plant. Probably a little too late and I won't get a strong scent from the flowers when dried but I decided to harvest the lot, dry them and use them!!!

Sunday morning I was up early cutting the lavender with my little girl. The morning sun was warm and I was surprised how much there was to tie in bundles.

Today I finally found somewhere to hang them...in the shed. Now to wait until they are ready. If the scent isn't very strong I have some lavender essential oil which will help.

I am now on the look out for some nice fabric....for xmas stocking fillers :)

Treats

I decided to treat myself....and this is what I bought.......
....a Grab Bag from Haiku Bags. Cute small bag with room for wallet, keys, phone etc. Great for shopping trips as it can be worn around the waist or across the body.
......and Hamanaka Crochet Hooks. Very comfy to hold and I will post more shortly when I have finished the bowl I am making.

Baking

Lemon Drizzle Loaf
(Overflowing) Red Velvet Cupcakes

Snickerdoodles and shopping

I had read about Snickerdoodles before Christmas last year while browsing Ravelry and thought they had something to do with Snickers chocolate bars. For Christmas I was given a book called Bake by Rachel Allan which I found had a recipe for Snickerdoodles. They have nothing to do with Snickers and don't contain nuts or chocolate! After researching on the net I discovered there are several different types and the recipes vary quite a lot. The recipe that I used made soft cake like biscuits. The biscuit was flavoured with nutmeg then balls of the dough were rolled in a mixture of cinnamon and sugar. They were very moreish!


Last week I ordered myself a Nostepinne from eBay and lovely sock yarn from Posh Yarn which I hope to use for Ishbel.

Time Machine

Last Thursday while happily surfing the internet my iMac started playing up. It was very slow and I thought it could do with a restart, which usually fixes this sort of thing. Tried and failed to restart it several times. So I hunted around my workspace for the original disks when all else failed. Started from the disk, ran Disk First Aid which also failed and done a hardware test which came up with an error code. I had to wait until Monday at work until I could surf the net and try and find a solution. The results fron google did not look good and I thought I would have to send my mac away to get a new hard disk.

I have thousands of photos, music and garageband tracks (my other halfs) which I did not want to lose. Luckily I invested in an external hardrive a couple of years ago and checked while I was at work that everything was backed up properly. It was all backed up...phew.

This morning I felt confident enough to wipe the entire imac and reinstall the software. This did take quite a while. After that I was able to plug in my external hardrive and use Time Machine to restore my entire mac. It worked beautifully everything seems to be back where it was originally - files in folder, photos in iphotos, music in iTunes and bookmarks in firefox.

If you use a mac I would highly recommend backing up your files using Time Machine.