I’m a photographer. By that I mean I take photographs, like this one below:
It’s one of my favourite recent photos, though I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because it’s in focus, quite well composed, I think the colours work well together (they’re all quite pastelly) and there’s an animal in it that didn’t flee by the time I had my camera ready. Also it was 4th July.
I tend not to think of myself as a photographer, though. I’m more a person who takes photos.
In my mind, there are three types of photographers:
- Casual snappers like me, for whom photography is a way to capture an image.
- Professionals and experts, for whom the act and art and technicality of photography is itself an interest and hobby. These people take really good photos.
- The pretenders. People who buy really expensive camera equipment and then take super-closeup photos with it.
It’s a bit like the audio world: there are people who just like to listen to music, there are people who can enjoy the music but also appreciate and enjoy the technical construction and execution of a piece, and then there are the people who spend hundreds of pounds on gold plated leads. I’m stretching that analogy quite far, but I hope you get the gist.
Expert photographers, or photographers, take some wonderful photos. Having complete control and understanding of a complex camera requires a lot of skill. You’ve got to think about lenses, apertures, exposures, focal lengths, white balances, shutter speeds, lighting, flashes, position and composition – to name only those aspects of which I am at least aware. And then there’s the whole skill of knowing what to take a photo of, which is a probably a lot harder to learn than any of the technical aspects.
Fergus Gill is such a photographer. He’s one of my brother’s friends, and he’s won a ton of awards for his photography. Check out his website and admire some of his incredible photos. His passion for photography is clear, as is his skill. How can you not respect and admire someone like that?
I take photos for two main reasons: to capture something of the moment that I think looks cool, and to capture memories ((Sometimes I take photos to use as illustrations, as in my post about strawberries.)). I take almost all of my photos on a Fujifilm A860. It cost £50 and I bought it online from Tesco Direct – it’s pretty basic, with few manual controls. But despite the limitations, when I decide to take a photo, I try to take the best photo that I can. Occasionally, I even go somewhere specifically to take photos to see what my camera is – and I am – capable of. I’d bet that Murray thinks of his photography in the same way.
The pretenders piss me off. I don’t have any specific examples, but the internet is awash with them. You know when you’ve seen a pretender’s photo: you reflexively roll your eyes and tut. They’re the people who think that buying better equipment is what makes you a better photographer. They’ll typically take photographs on their fancy SLRs that are indistinguishable from point-and-shoot photos (such as mine). They’re like the people who buy a Ferrari just to do to the weekly shop at Tesco. If you see a photo and think ‘pretentious’, it’ll probably be taken by one of these pretenders. They give photography and photographers a bad name.
Perhaps one day I’ll decide that photography is something that I want to seriously pursue. It’s true that the more photos I take, the more I come to understand about photography, and the more I’d like to see what I could do with better and more controllable equipment. But for now I’m happy with what I’ve got, and anyway, I don’t have the money for a better camera.
I’ll be posting more photos on my blog ((Chances that I will actually increase the frequency of my posting on this blog? 25%.)) as I upload good ones to my Flickr account. There’s usually a story behind each photo, and I want to get better at telling stories. And I want to show off my photos.
I bought an aluminium grill today. It cost £12.99 me and I love it. It’s square (about a foot long ((Actually, it’s 28cm x 28cm.)) on each side), it has a wooden handle ((With a loop of metal at the end so that you can hang the pan on a hook.)) and it’s got an amazing Teflon “three layer non-stick coating” ((The coating on the one I bought was actually broken through in several places, so when I got home and inspected it – finding a couple of spots where I could see the aluminium underneath – I took it back to Aldi for an exchange. They handled it perfectly.)).
I was excited to try it as soon as I got home. I washed the pan in hot soapy water, and then I was instructed to ‘grease the pan with cooking oil’ and put it over a medium heat for 2 to 3 minutes before cooking.
I spent about 5 minutes washing the pan because it was so fun to watch how the water behaved on the non-stick surface. The way that the water held together and raced around the pan reminded me of how mercury behaves in a normal container ((I’d love to play with a large quantity of mercury. It’s so dense that you can float many metals in it.)).
I had some salmon left over in the freezer from when I bought a whole side ((It was reduced from £18 to £6.)), so I decided I’d test my grill with a piece of that.
That’s a picture of the salmon side, just after I bought it from Tesco back in June. It looked healthy and smelt alright despite being reduced to clear, so I bought it. It’s always nice to have a bit of raw fish or meet in the freezer because you never know when you might need something to cook at short notice, as happened today ((I also like it because I forget about it, and then when I go through my freezer I’ll be pleasantly surprised to find that I have some lovely salmon still to eat.)).
At this point it would be appropriate to mention something else I bought today. In the photograph above, there’s a knife next to my salmon. It’s called a santoku knife, and I bought it about a year ago. It’s an incredibly sharp and strong general-purpose knife, and it has a perfect balance in my hand. I use it to do pretty much everything in the kitchen. Aldi was selling santoku knives today for £19.99. I bought one to take to university – I can’t cook happily without a good knife any more, and the santoku is the best one I’ve found ((I’ve not yet decided if I’m going to take my grill to university.)). And FYI: I bought 4 tins of coconut milk ((It cost 47 pence for each 400ml tin.)) whilst I was as Aldi, too.
When the grill was ready, I placed the frozen piece of salmon ((I couldn’t be bothered to defrost it. Too boring.)) into the pan and cooked it over a medium-high heat for a few minutes on each side. I’ve read that Teflon can break down at extreme temperatures but I don’t think I’ll be able to reach such a heat without noticing that something is wrong – probably the oil starting to burn. It’s nothing to worry about. After the fish was seared, I continued to cook it gently for 10 or 15 minutes ((I wanted to make sure that it was thoroughly cooked, as this is fish that’s been in the freezer for 8 weeks and I hadn’t defrosted it before cooking.)) until I thought it was done.
In all my excitement I’d forgotten to cook anything to go with the salmon, but that didn’t matter – it was delicious to eat all by itself. My grill did a great job.
Steak tomorrow.
P.S. I can highly recommend both the grill pan and the santoku knife from Aldi. They’re both rather good.
There are many films about death, or at least I presume there must be, because death is such an important part of life ((A vital part? Currently inevitable, but will it always be so? Should it always be so?)). Yet I can’t think of any film where the main theme is death; that is, one where death is not overshadowed by ideas such as ‘the redemptive power of love’ or kindness or cruelty or… anything. Whatever it is, it usually involves kissing.
Often when I’m watching a film and there’s a significant death, I remember my idea. Surely someone has already done this, I think. But I don’t know if anyone has ((I think there is such a film out there but I’ve just not seen it yet.)).
Rather than a death being shown in relation the ways in which it affects others – which is clearly the way to tell an interesting story ((My idea can only really be effective once.)) – why have I never seen a film where the death is everything, the main event, the end? That’s what life and death is, after all.
My idea is for a film which starts out normally, like any other film. The story gets going, and it’s actually quite a good one. We start to bond with the characters and get interested in what’s going to happen. Think of Kick-Ass half-way through. And then something happens. The main character – the one who we identify with and whose ‘eyes’ we are seeing the film through – dies. And that’s it. Cut to black, credits, lights up.
Imagine Inception if, when Cobb goes to see his Dad in a lecture theatre, he accidentally tripped, fell down the stairs and broke his neck. In The Wrestler, when Randy cut his finger in the store, imagine if he just bled to death there and then, end of film. Imagine Kick-Ass choking to death on his cornflakes.
There are many films with significant deaths, but the point of my idea is the finality of death, and the fact that it can be completely unexpected. When you do die, that’s the end for you.
Let the audience think about that as they walk out of the cinema.
What did I do in my gap year? In my gap year, I grew some strawberries.
I grew some last year too. Late last spring, Ruairidh’s Mum gave us some of her excess runners so that we could grow our own plants. I put them in a small border in my back garden, watered them and then let them grow. Come summer, naturally the plants were new and still establishing themselves. Unfortunately, I wasn’t around when what little fruit had grown actually ripened. I try not to think about that cruel summer of ’09. The wound is still too raw.
After the fruit was gone and I was back home the plants did well. We didn’t have a particularly nice summer last year, but it wasn’t awful and the weather was warm right through until the end of October. That was great for my strawberry plants; although they were too young to have produced much fruit, by autumn they had grown sufficiently that they produced a large number of runners to end the season.
What do you do with runners? They’re the shoots that the strawberry plants send out as a way of asexually reproducing. A cloned plant grows on the end of the runner and tries to find soil in order to establish a new, independent plant. This is great if you want more plants, but if the runners are growing before the fruit is finished, resources are being diverted away from making your sweet, sweet strawberries even bigger, juicier and more delicious. That’s bad, so you cut off any runners that form.
However, the majority of my runners were growing harmless after the fruit was gone, so I let them be. And they grew well – the original 5 or 6 plants made so many runners that I didn’t know what to do with them all, as there was hardly any growing space in the back garden available to grow more plants. To begin with I was resigned to chopping the rest off and throwing them away until I realised that I might be able to make some space in the front garden. My front garden is completely gravelled, but I thought I might be able make holes in the ground sheet and let the plants grow through the gravel. If there’s a choice between having lots of strawberries to eat and not having lots of strawberries to eat, I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure I have some. After all, strawberries are delicious.
I decided that I had nothing to lose – even if these plants would never go on to produce a single strawberry, I would be exercising, enjoying the fresh air, having fun listening to podcasts and audiobooks, and learning something too. So in late December, with the runners begging to find soil and take root, I cut them from their parent plants and moved them to the front garden. I felt like a plant surgeon.
I was right, it was fun. 
Yes, the gravel was a little frustrating – digging into it is much like digging into sand: the harder you try to dig a hole, the more the sides fall down to fill it back up again. And when I was finally able to reach the ground sheet, the soil beneath didn’t look too promising – it was a solid mass, it looked completely inorganic, and in places it was so far down that a plant would have drowned in the gravel above and around it. Still, most of the 30 or so plants were just about touching the soil. If the Sun kept shining and the plants had the gumption to send out roots to find the soil – and then be able to make use of it once they found it – I thought they might have a chance of surviving.
As you can see from the photo above, the leaves quickly started turning yellow. Were they not getting enough light? Was I not watering them enough? Were they dying? I had no idea and I still don’t know, but I have a theory: initially, cut off from their host plants, they were unable to maintain the level of health that they had when resources were plentiful. So until their roots embedded in the soil (fueled either by photosynthesis or stored energy) and started absorbing water and nutrients, the leaves yellowed and died. Though I’ve also learned that that’s just what happens with strawberries: most of their leaves die when winter comes. I just hoped that they’d take root before winter really set in.
Was 3 weeks long enough? The plants ran the length of this side of the wall above. It had been frosty for a while and towards the end of December it snowed, completely covering my plants. They wouldn’t see the Sun again until February. There was nothing I could do but wait and enjoy the snow and -12°C temperatures.
When the snow melted, I couldn’t even tell if they’d survived. There was still something left – some dead brown leaves, some larger yellow ones falling off the plants, and some small dark green ones that must have just started growing just before I moved them to the front garden. As spring drew nearer, it was clear that some of the plants were indeed dead, particularly those in deeper gravel that must not have been able to both reach soil and stay in the Sun. They wasted away to almost nothing. But most of the other plants looked alright. They were still tiny – I got rid of any brown or yellow leaves, leaving just those small green ones ((Which is partially what makes me think that all but a few small new leaves will naturally die off every year anyway.)) – but they were not rotting. They must have taken root in December. I kept them watered, and in April they started to get bigger.
The photo above is of my strawberry plants in the back garden that were now a year old. The last frost had passed and the warmth of the Sun was increasing. Although over the winter they had been reduced to stumps with a few small leaves, a fraction of their autumnal size, they were growing again. As in the front garden, I removed the dead leaves and kept them watered. They had survived the harshest winter that I’ve ever experienced.
Being already a year old and well established, the plants in the back garden looked healthier than those in the front, with larger and more plentiful leaves. Here’s a photo of the ones in the back just after being watered at the end of April. And then, like with much of gardening, all I had to do was water the plants every day, and wait ((Surprisingly, slugs did not seem to attack my plants, so unlike pretty much everything in my garden, I didn’t have to defend my strawberries from pests.)).
Waiting was easy; I was in France having a great time. When I returned home at the beginning of June, my plants were in flower:
The flowers are small and white; there are two good – though overexposed ((Probably a fingerprint on the lens.)) – examples here. Once the flower is pollinated ((Thank you bees!)) and finished doing its business, the white petals fall away leaving a little yellow lump on the end of a stalk – you can see a couple at the top of the photo. This is what becomes the strawberry fruit. Over the course of several weeks, it grows larger and heavier, and then suddenly, in a few days it, it ripens from a pale green colour to become a classic red strawberry.
I found my first strawberry on 15th June:
The plants in the front garden, although smaller and newer, were more advanced than those older ones in the back. I think this is because the front garden receives more sunlight in the morning towards midday. The red strawberry here would have been as green as the other strawberries on the bunch just a day or two before. I decided I would leave it one more day to ripen before I sampled the first fruit of my labours.
I never got to eat that strawberry. As it turns out, I’m an idiot and blackbirds are bastards. The next day, the berry was almost all gone and had been rendered inedible. I was furious. This was war. After putting in all those hours planting and then caring for my plants, there was no way I was letting a fucking bird steal my reward. But the birds were fucking with me. The next day, I woke up late and opened my curtains. That second, a blackbird flew to my plants and started tugging at a strawberry. The cheek! I banged the window and it fucked off, but it was too late. When I came to inspect the damage, I found a half eaten strawberry. It wasn’t even nearly ripe. Fuckers.
The common way to protect strawberries, I found out, was with a large net covering the entire plant. But I didn’t have any netting, and my strawberries are positioned in such a shape and location that erecting a net would have been awkward. I had a better idea – I would cover my bunches of strawberries with bottles. 2-litre bottles (those that Pepsi and Coke come in) were the best, I found, and as there was a bit of a family gathering going on and the recycling bin hadn’t been taken away for a little while, there were a load of bottles at my disposal. I wanted clear bottles; I chopped them in half with scissors, and covered the bunches of strawberries with one half. The sunlight would still get through the clear plastic and air would still be able to circulate around the berries, but the birds would no longer be able to reach my fruit. The gravel actually made this easier – I could resculpt it with my hand in order to support the bottles so that they wouldn’t topple.
This solution worked perfectly, and once I had collected enough bottles to cover my needs, I lost no more berries to the birds.
And so, on 18th June 2010, around midday, I ventured into the front garden under the blazing mid-summer Sun to see how my strawberries were doing. Bingo. Red, red, red. Perfectly ripe. They hadn’t grown as large as I had hoped they might – they were first-year plants, after all – but it’s not the size that matters. It’s the taste. I picked all of the ones that I thought were ready to eat, washed them, removed the stalks, and then took this picture:
That’s right. A whole fucking bowl. I weighed them – four hundred fucking grams. That’s how much you get in a supermarket punnet, and it cost me nothing! Then I tasted one. Oh my God, any doubts that I had wasted all my time watering and planting and maintaining vanished instantly. As happens every summer, I remembered just how much I loved strawberries, especially ones straight from the plant. But one is all I ate. Something I’ve learned about strawberries is that although they’re great freshly picked, I like them even more when they’re chilled.
I put them in the fridge and waited for the evening. What a treat.
This continued for a week. My yield from the front garden was steady at about 100 grams per day, and for that I was grateful. They were delicious. Although the berries in the back garden were already much larger than those from the front had been, they were still a week or so from ripening.
But on 25th June, I was going away for 4 weeks.
I returned on 21st July. In the time that I had been gone, the strawberries in the front garden were finished, and there were only a few left in the back. There was one huge ripe one that I ate immediately. It was the best one I’d had all year, but I couldn’t help feeling slightly disappointed at how many I had missed. I would ultimately eat only a third of the strawberries that I grew; my mother and brother picked and ate most of the rest ((With my permission, of course.)).
A few days ago I took a picture of my last large strawberry:
Although there are still a few small berries to ripen over the next few days, strawberry season is practically finished. Of course, that’s not the end of the story.
‘What about some numbers, Wilf?’ Thanks for asking; it just happens that I have some numbers for you. Every time I picked strawberries, I recorded how much my harvest weighed. I measured in grams, using a scale accurate to 20 grams, and when I was away, my Mum measured in ounces, using a scale accurate to the ounce. I converted hers into grams, and made a graph. Let’s have a look at the data:
What can we see?
- The first measurement was my 400 gram haul on 18th June. That’s clearly an anomaly and it’s easy to explain: I had not been picking strawberries up to that date, so there would have been a backlog of ripe strawberries stretching back a few days. The weather was also very good and might have been great for ripening.
- After that day, and through the rest of June, I picked a steady 100 grams every day; this was the front garden in maximum production mode. Next year I would expect this portion of the graph to be level at at least 200 grams, as the plants will be much better established.
- At the beginning of July, the line rises. This is because the strawberries in the back garden began to ripen.
- Around the 4th July, there is a peak when the plants in the back garden produce their maximum load. The weather was all particularly good in the preceding days, resulting in more of the fruit ripening at once.
- Combined with the end of the front garden’s production and a fall after this exceptional maximum, the line then decreases quite sharply until the back garden alone is producing about 50 grams a day for the rest of the month.
- The final peak is unexplained.
The total yield was approximately 4.5 kilograms, equivalent to 10 supermarket punnets – about £20 worth!
Fascinating. And delicious.
Overall, I’m extremely pleased with my plants, and I don’t feel that I’ve wasted a minute on them. I hope next year I’ll be home for more of the season – what with my more mature plants, as well as the new ones I’ll plant, I predict I’ll grow at least 10 kilograms.
My final problem, now that the berries are gone, is that the new runners are growing insanely quickly. This year I’m letting them root into pots filled with soil so that they can establish as independent plants before I relocate them. I’ve already used 100 pots, and there are still more shoots growing:
This afternoon, about a week after potting most of the runners, I removed a few from their pots to see how they were progressing. They’re doing great, sending out plenty of roots and starting to grow independently of their hosts.
Finally, what will I do with these 100+ strawberry plants? I’ve not decided. I think I may be able to find room for another 20 in the front garden, but the rest will need to be planted elsewhere. Yet I can’t bring myself to throw them away – as I’ve said, I’d much rather have strawberries than no strawberries, and I’m happy to do the work to make that so. Perhaps neighbours might want them; perhaps I’ll plant some in my Grandma’s garden (she lives nearby); or perhaps I’ll find a spot somewhere out in the wild so that the whole world can enjoy them.
I’ll let you know what happens.
If you want to know more about strawberries, read Wikipedia’s article on garden strawberries. I haven’t read it, but I bet it’ll be good and much more informative than this post. You know the Wikipedians write good stuff.
Hello Internet. I’m back.
This is the first time in 4 months that I’ve been home without having something gobbling up most of my time and attention.
It started in late March when Will and his girlfriend visited, and then my nephew ((Back then he was about 12 weeks old.)) and his parents came up to Perth too ((My eldest sister and brother-in-law, a great couple.)). I don’t care what other people do, but when there’s a family gathering going on, I try to spend as much time with everyone as possible. If there’s a book I really want to read or a game I really want to play, I’ll wait until a less antisocial time to play it ((And, by the way, when everyone’s visiting I might not have the opportunity to do that sort of stuff even if I wanted. The house is full and I’ll be sharing a bedroom so there’s a good chance I won’t even be able to find a space to do something alone.)), especially if I won’t see this sibling again for another 8 months.
The problem ((Though it’s definitely not a bad thing.)) is that I have five siblings. I can be waiting a long time.
After that, it was my 19th birthday and I thought: “Fuck it. If I don’t plan something for my gap year then I’m never going to do anything.” So I did. I booked my plane and Eurostar tickets for a month exploring France by train ((I like trains.)). I spent the next couple of weeks planning it all, which was way more stressful than I had imagined it would be ((Perhaps more on that another time.)). Maybe that’s why I’d been putting it off for so long. But I did a good job, and I learned a few things when doing it, too – most memorably the reason why travel agents still exist.
I even got an extra day to plan, thanks to the ever-giving Iceland, which just happened to be (perhaps) the worst day of my conscious life ((When I finished packing, the Sun was coming up. Then I had to catch an early train and bus to Edinburgh Airport, had finally got checked in and started to relax, when my flight was cancelled. Motherfuckers. Then followed what can only be describe as hell.)). I did get to France, eventually, and only two days late, then I spent a month having a really good time – albeit without home comforts and regular internet access ((That is, this wasn’t a chance for me to catch up on all those games and films and internetting that I’ve been putting off.)). It was an epic adventure, with plenty of stress. More on that another time.
I got back to Perth a month later (after a couple of nights in London) but after watching the Perth Airshow and then walking my Aunt & Uncle’s dogs for a couple of days, June turned into one long family gathering. There was a big birthday as the main event, and throughout the month I saw pretty much all of my family ((The highlight, of course, being my little nephew (about 5 months old then) staying for two weeks.)). Meanwhile, towards the end of the month I was faced with the hell of having to pick my perfectly ripe strawberries every day ((I fucking love it really.)), and I even had to squeeze in a barbecue with that twat Ruairidh ((Actually, it was epic, especially our homemade burgers, although Ruairidh was too tired/too much of a pussy to watch a Borg TNG episode afterwards.)).
Two days after all the visitors had left… I was off, too. This time I went to London to stay with Will ((Did I mention that I traveled first class? More on that another time.)) and then I went to stay with my Dad for a few weeks. These were times to be making the most of the long summer days, visiting places and getting out on our bikes as a family ((And a bit of camping, too.)). But again, not much time alone and very limited internet access.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining; I’ve had a really good time and I’d much rather have the year as all summer (when my time seems to be spent like this) than all winter (when I have much more time to myself to follow my selfish whims as much as I want to) if I had to choose. In these last few months, I’ve had more moments of amazement than ever before ((The highlight involves 2 tornadoes.)). All I’m trying to say is that my life has been different for a while, but now I’m happy to back home to enjoy the end of the summer a bit more quietly.
Well, what have I been missing out on?
- Gaming. I don’t remember the last time I seriously played a game. It definitely wasn’t this year. When I’ve got a few minutes with nothing to do, I’ll whip out my iPod and have a go on Tetris, Bejeweled 2, Angry Birds or whatever, but that’s in no way a replacement for proper gaming. I’ve got piles of games in Steam that I’ve bought and never even downloaded, including Left 4 Dead 1 & 2. You’d think with a gap year and no job, that all I’d’ve been doing was gaming. Nope. Fuck. What have I been doing? ((Of course, I know what I’ve been doing, and I am very much pleased with how I have spent my gap year.))
- By the way, I still find it hard to believe how much my iPod touch has changed my life and the extent to which I rely on it to connect with the world. Without it or a similar device ((For example, if technology was 10 years less advanced.)), my times away from the internet would be far less rich. Notwithstanding its offline use, it’s so refreshing to be able to use it with an internet connection now that I’m back home. The internet rocks. I can follow links, update Facebook, send emails, even check the weather forecast whenever the hell I want. It’s nice to be home.
- Books? No. One thing that I’ve not missed out on is reading. As you can see, I’ve been managing to read (or listen to) a few books a month, much like I always do. It’s easy to find the time and the space to read a book, and hell, what else are you going to do when you’re alone in France walking around all day? Talk to yourself? Eat your arm? I listened to a load of podcasts there, too.
- Blogging. I actually quite enjoy writing, and not for any egotistic reason ((Though I would say that, wouldn’t I.)). It’s theraputic.
- Photos. I’ve taken thousands of photos whilst I’ve been doing all this stuff, but a lot of the stuff I’ve not even looked at. I’m not pretentious about it, but I take some good photos. I like looking through them, putting them into albums, adjusting them, getting a few nice ones printed and uploading some good’uns to Flickr. That’s something I’ve not done for a while, and I look forward to doing it again.
- But the main thing that I’ve been missing out on? Films. Before returning to Perth last week, and excluding the 8 or so James Bonds that I watched with my Dad, the last proper film I watched was Lars and the Real Girl on 23rd March. And I didn’t even like that film. Yes, I had time when I could have watched some films, but there’s been so much good TV (particularly season finales) to catch up on that I just didn’t get round to it ((By the way, I watched all 6 seasons of The Office US throughout April (pretty much).)). Anyway, I have time now so I’m trying to rectify this situation: in the last 3 days I’ve watch Kick-Ass, Juno, and Synecdoche, New York. I’ll watch another tonight, too.
Of course, in less than 2 months I’m going to university ((In fact, my lectures start 2 months today, 27th September.)), and then everything could change. But I don’t think it will change that much: as long as I can cope with the work and am not spending all my time out getting drunk, I’ll have plenty of time to play all the games, read all the books and watch all the films I want. Or maybe I won’t even want to.
Before that, I have this time at home to enjoy. My time is not entirely without demand – there’s quite a bit that I have to do regarding university (mainly money stuff) and my nephew ((Who’ll be about 7 months old…)) is visiting again at the end of August. Once I’m at university and my sister finishes maternity leave, I’ll hardly see him ((He lives hundreds of miles away.)). I’ll make the most of it all.
Before I go, one thing I’ve noticed:
- I love reading old blog posts and seeing all of my broken promises (example: “I’ll say more about that walk in a blog post in the near future.”). I promise not to do that in the future.
Alright, I’m off to make a cheesecake. With raspberries.
