Tag Archives: June Photo a Day

June 23 — last

I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to portray today’s topic, last, but yesterday I had a brainstorm. We got an antique iron shoe last as “etcetera” with one of the lots we purchased at our first auction in England (the auction house has a nasty habit of lumping a lot of worthless junk with quality pieces they know someone will buy, just to move the crap out of their warehouse). It’s a bit rusty and a lot dirty, so I thought I’d hang on to it as a project on which to practice my cast iron restoration skills (carefully researched on the internet, of course). Eventually it will have a new life as a doorstop–assuming I can figure out which way to orient it to avoid broken toes. If restoration goes according to plan, I’ll apply my perfected techniques to some iron pieces I intentionally bought, like a finial off an old fencepost (soon to become a bookend) and a Victorian boot scraper (soon to become, well, a boot scraper).

June Photo a Day hosted by Chantelle at Fat Mum Slim

June 22 — enjoying life

It’s been a hectic week, one in which I haven’t set aside much time for enjoying life. So this evening I took a thirty-minute time-out to soak in the tub with a good book and a glass of wine. For half an hour I was almost able to forget about the two papers I need to write and the forty thousand other things on my to do list. 🙂

June Photo a Day hosted by Chantelle at Fat Mum Slim

June 21 — lunchtime

Mmm, time to eat. I’d already spent two hours dragging a ladder around the garden trimming jungle-dense hedges of rose, honeysuckle, and laurel when lunchtime rolled around, and I was hungry! I knew I still had two to three more hours of balancing and whacking ahead of me, so needed a full plate, heavy on the protein, to have the energy to go back out and finish the job. Ham, a mozzarella stick, a tomato, pickles, balsamic and sea salt potato chips, an apple, and a glass of skim milk. Mmm. Full belly…now if I only had time for a nap!

June Photo a Day hosted by Chantelle at Fat Mum Slim

June 20 — cute!

I’m a cat lover, so naturally I think cats of all shapes and sizes are kawaii (かわいい). I’ve met these furry felines on my walks in the past month, and they all fit my criteria for cute. 

June Photo a Day hosted by Chantelle at Fat Mum Slim

June 19 — currently reading

In addition to two textbooks and numerous journal articles for my linguistics class, I am currently reading piles and piles of magazines that need to get gone before the movers come next month. In my own defense, only two of these subscriptions are actually mine–the hubby reads the rest and passes them along so I don’t miss anything good. If I flip through two a day, the entire pile should be gone the week before we pack out–just in the nick of time!

June Photo a Day hosted by Chantelle at Fat Mum Slim

June 18 — Street

I get the idea of a traffic-calming chicane…a large island of concrete spread across one lane that forces traffic on the street to slow down and take turns to get through the center of town. What I don’t get is putting a pub table on one of those islands. To the Brits, this looks like a great spot to have a pint and enjoy the sunshine. To a jaded American, this looks like a lawsuit waiting to happen. What happens when someone unfamiliar with the town is going too fast and runs into the chicane? What happens when one of those cheery ale-slugging pub patrons decides to get up and go for a drunken wander…right into the middle of traffic? 

June Photo a Day hosted by Chantelle at Fat Mum Slim

June 17 — centred

Whew! You’ve got to be very centred (centered for those who don’t read Australian) to get one of these narrowboats through the locks and canals of the UK. 

June Photo a Day hosted by Chantelle (an Australian) at Fat Mum Slim