This Week I……

Hello there! Gosh, can you believe it’s November already? Where is the year going? Etc. Etc

Halloween is now over, so we are now on the long downhill to Christmas involving coffee in red cups, Christmas sandwiches and me wearing every festive item of clothing I own.

Before that, though, I am making the most of the last of the Halloween vibes, eating homemade pumpkin pie and rewatching Sabrina.

This Week I….

Enjoyed some Autumnal Weather

I mean, I also hated some autumnal weather this week on the days where it was damp and drizzly and dark, but this week featured a few of those days that I love Autumn for. The days where it’s bright and crisp and surprisingly warm in the sunshine.

Thankfully, one of those days was Sunday when I ran the Trowse 10k. But there were others later in the week where we got to kick through crisp leaves on dog walks and see glorious rainbows under dramatic clouds.

Signed up for a Half Marathon

In a fit of post 10k enthusiasm, I then signed up for a Half Marathon in February next year. I haven’t run a Half since 2014 and after a bit of a sucky year fitness-wise I’m looking forward to having a big challenge to train for and work towards.

I have a training plan. It starts tomorrow. At the moment I am very enthusiastic about it. Let’s see how long that lasts. I think it might be time to invest in some more cold weather running gear……

Did Not Pick My Own Pumpkin

In fact, I did not pick my own Pumpkin twice. There is a Pick Your Own farm near my house that has a Pumpkin patch and I really fancied going and picking my own Pumpkin.

They also have a nice dog-friendly cafe, so on Monday afternoon we all got in the car to head up there, and halfway there I remembered it was closed on Mondays. So I didn’t pick my own Pumpkin then.

On Tuesday we tried again, only to discover that all the Pick Your Own Pumpkins were sold out. Apparently much like all the good Advent Calendars, if you want a PYO Pumpkin for Halloween you need to go super early.

We did have a nice cup of coffee and a cake, and I did get to pose with a nice big Pumpkin they had in the farm shop, but it was a little large for me to carve this year, so all I did was pose. Maybe next year.

Bought a New Camera

I did not want to buy a new camera, I was perfectly happy with my 8 year old Canon 550d that I spent nearly £600 on. I thought that would basically last me forever, right? Then on Tuesday, just as I was preparing to take some quite important photos, it suddenly stopped working, coming up with a random error message.

I tried everything I could to fix it, but it wasn’t playing ball and it appeared that for the cost of repairing that particular error I might as well buy a new camera.

An entry-level DSLR, costing about a third of what I paid back in 2011, apparently these days actually has higher specs than my old camera. Having a new one isn’t a bad thing, but it was £200 I wasn’t anticipating having to spend which has stressed me out a little.

Bought Halloween Gifts

Halloween gifts might not be a thing, but it definitely should be. On Wednesday I had 3 Personal Training clients, and I thought they should all have a lovely Halloween gift, so I treated them all to a Pumpkin drinking glass.

I did not buy a Pumpkin drinking glass for myself though, something I am now sorely regretting.

Did All the Halloween Things

And when Halloween itself arrived it was time to figure out exactly how many Halloween things I could do in one day.

I wore Pumpkin socks, ate biscuits shaped like bats and crumpets with Jack O’Lantern faces. I baked Pumpkin pie (yes, I BAKED) made tortilla chips that I cut into bat shapes, carved a pumpkin and made lychee eyeballs. I decorated the table with skulls and lacy tablecloths and the mantelpiece with pumpkins and candles.

Then we went out for Cocktails for a friends birthday, came home, ate dinner (Which was a Shepherd’s Pie that Mr LLL had artfully created a Vampire face on) and snuggled up on the sofa to watch a movie and drink green cocktails, except I was so exhausted I was asleep by 10:30pm.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Oh, we may have also dressed up the Pugs, because what is the point of Halloween if you can’t dress up Pugs in witches hats.

Went to the Beach in the Rain

Ok, so it was only a bit of drizzle. Friday, the day we had planned to take the Pugs to beach, was NOT one of those beautiful crisp Autumn days.

We went to the beach anyway, because the Pugs deserved a good run around after lots of dark and damp evenings and we didn’t have time to reschedule.

East Runton beach in North Norfolk is a lovely wide, sandy beach, with some huge rocks. Last time we went there were lots of Hag stones, so we thought we might find a few, but this time around the ones we found were more like Hag boulders and not exactly pocket-sized, so we left them.

We took a flask of coffee and biscuits and generally made the most of a damp afternoon. I also took some photos for a blog post coming next week.

Dismantled a Dishwasher

Finally, in an exciting end to my week there was another installment of “All the expensive things I own deciding to break all at once”.

As if the death of my camera wasn’t enough, our dishwasher also wants in on the action and had stopped heating up water. Yes, we could handwash, but our kitchen is so small and we are so lazy that this means that every available surface is permanently covered in dirty plates and there are never any glasses to drink out of.

When we moved house in 2012 we treated ourselves to a dishwasher, which died in 2016 and we reluctantly bought a new one. Now that replacement has stopped working. I refuse to believe that dishwashers need replacing every 3 years. So instead we did some investigating into the basics of dishwasher repair, and with the help of some You Tube videos and a borrowed multimeter that we don’t really know how to use properly determined that possibly, maybe, hopefully it was the flow-through heater that was broken.

We have spent £30 on a new flow-through heater and hopefully by the end of tomorrow we will have a repaired dishwasher.

Watch this space folks…….

How was your week?