Weather – Spirit of Dee

Day out at Newcastle Quayside

6 July 20186 July 2018 Dee Leave a comment

Like the rest of the UK, we’ve been enjoying glorious weather here in Newcastle for the past fortnight. Last weekend, we were able to make the most of it; as I mentioned previously, we were celebrating Geth’s birthday a couple of weeks late, and so on Saturday we went into town for some shopping and food, interspersed with a visit to our favourite beer garden seeing as how it was so nice.

Bridges of the Tyne — View of the bridges of the Tyne from the Free Trade Inn beer garden.

We were fairly lucky to get a space in the Free Trade Inn beer garden – it was a hot Saturday afternoon, which is a rarity, and so the people of Newcastle were out in force in the centre of town – but we did manage it, and Geth immediately made a start on the bar snacks.

I’m not quite sure what’s going on with the light in these pictures – I blame the sun. Clearly my smartphone camera has become accustomed to British weather and can’t cope with bright light!

We’d got all our shopping done fairly efficiently, so we were able to enjoy a good few hours in the sun before our restaurant booking.

Pints of beer and cider — I actually like plastic glasses, even if they’re not very solid to hold – they feel like summer to me!

We then headed to Uno’s Trattoria, one of our favourite Italian restaurants in Newcastle, which Geth had selected for his birthday meal.

Geth with birthday meal — Geth had been looking forward to that pork belly for weeks.

The reason Geth chose Uno’s Trattoria is that, for the last year or so, they’ve had pork belly on the menu, which is one of his favourite foods. Apparently most Italian restaurants don’t cook meat dishes properly (being a vegetarian I’m generally unaware of these things), but this restaurant must be an exception, as the pork belly went down very well.

I, meanwhile, went for my favourite Italian restaurant treat of pizza:

Rocket and parmesan pizza — That rocket and parmesan topping was immense.

We also had dessert – we both went for the white chocolate cheesecake – but we were so keen to get stuck into it that I forgot to take a picture.

A lovely day out overall. Happily the weather has continued, and it looks like it’ll be similar this weekend – so we’ll need to take it carefully when running the Great North 10k on Sunday!

Suddenly summer

7 May 20187 May 2018 Dee Leave a comment

I can’t be sure, because the days are sort of melting into each other at the moment (only three more twelve-hour shifts! I can do this!), but it seems that we’ve had about two weeks in a row where the weather’s actually been quite nice – warm, sunny, blue skies. There are also lots of flowers in our new garden, mostly weeds like dandelions, but still flowers. The ice-cream van shows up every day around one o’clock in the afternoon with a creepy jingle straight out of a horror film. And Geth’s actually been mowing the lawn. It’s beginning to look a bit like it might not be winter anymore. In fact, leaving aside the only-just-beginning-to-bud leaves on the trees, it’s beginning to look like summer.

I’m pretty happy about that. The winter was so long and awful (still snowing in early April) that it was starting to feel like it would never end. But because of that, it sort of feels like we’ve skipped spring and gone straight to summer, which I’m thrilled about (I don’t like typical British springs – wet, windy and not yet warm enough!). This has meant that I’m actually starting to get excited about all the stuff I’m doing in the summer – I’m just a bit worried about having enough time to prepare for it!

Of course, sod’s law means that as soon as I’m done with work at the end of this week and can actually go outside, the nice weather will disappear. At least that should mean that it won’t be too warm for running at the weekend!

Feeling the cold

25 April 201825 April 2018 Dee Leave a comment

We’ve finally seen some spring weather in the last week or so. Outside, it’s been lovely – the winter was so long and awful that being able to walk around in bare legs and light jackets last week felt like being on holiday somewhere tropical.

Inside, however, when I’m sitting still (which I’ve been doing a lot, obviously, as I’ve got a lot of work to do at the moment), I’m still really feeling the cold, and have had to have the electric fire going next to me most of the time now that we’ve pretty much switched off the central heating for the summer. It’s one of those disadvantages of weight loss – I just don’t have that excess blubber to keep me warm anymore.

I’m definitely looking forward to it warming up more for the summer – I feel silly having the fire on this late in the season!

Shoe storage!

10 April 201810 April 2018 Dee Leave a comment

One of the shelving projects that Dad and I (mostly Dad) did over the weekend was for my shoes. Even though I got rid of a lot of shoes, I still need a good amount of storage for my remaining 59 62 pairs, especially as I’ve been on a bit of a shoe binge lately (though I think I’m satiated for now). Some of my pairs are ‘legacy shoes’ (i.e. old pairs I’ll never wear again but am keeping in storage boxes or on display for sentimental reasons), and there are a couple of pairs for gardening that I’m keeping in the cupboard off the kitchen, and my dancing shoes live in my gym bag, and my running shoes tend to stay in the Skubb hanger I bought for the hallway…but that still leaves a good 48 pairs that needed a place to live in the dressing room. Which they now have:

Shoe storage — Dad built the shelves, out of our old Billy bookcases, to fit around the wardrobes, chests of drawers and mirror that I have in the dressing room.

As you can see, there’s plenty space for more, which is probably a good thing knowing me.

It’s very nice having all my shoes to hand. Of course, since I put them all up, it’s been pouring with rain and I’ve not been out (save for a very wet run this morning) so I’ve been living in my slippers indoors. It will be good to get some use out of them once the weather clears up, though!

Spring?

24 March 201824 March 2018 Dee Leave a comment

I did parkrun this morning, for the first time in a couple of months. Between the move and the weather, I’ve just not been feeling like running at all since late January, so it was nice to get back to it. Lovely day too, and it was perfect running conditions.

I’m hoping that we’ve seen the end of the bad winter weather now, though there are a lot of ominous rumours about a white Easter next weekend. I sincerely hope it’s not, as Geth and I are visiting the in-laws and the last thing we need is Christmas-style travel disruption.

With the clocks going forward tonight, it would be nice if it could just be spring weather from now on. Fingers crossed!