Five on Friday

Hello dear friends and readers, gosh is it really the end of another week ? It must be time for another Five on Friday, hosted again by Amy over at Love Made My Home. This week I have a bit of a random selection, just stuff from my week (and a bit from the week before), nothing earth-shattering, but I hope you enjoy my photos and blurb anyway ....

1. Can you believe it's February already ? I normally hate January, definitely have that post-Christmas Blues type thing, but this year hasn't been as bad. I've no idea why, but I'm glad it's February, and I'm glad to be waking up feeling good. Having daffodils around always helps too, they just seem so fresh and new and bright, and full of hope and promise.

2. The weekend before last I entered an OCR - Obstacle Course Race - called Muscle Acre. And yes it definitely lived up to its name. Basically an OCR is a run but with lots of obstacles and lots and lots of mud and water. Here's an un-muddy photo of me before the race ...

It was the first OCR I'd done, and wowsers it was SUCH good fun! Completely exhausting, but tremendous fun. On the day of the race it was 0 degC, and the first obstacle was to climb in and out of a skip filled with cold water. So pretty much within the first 5 minutes we were soaking wet. The good thing about that is it makes you keep going as you'd get far too cold far too quick if you didn't. A bit further on we had to wade through muddy water that was waist deep with massive slabs of ice floating about on it. Can you see my lips turning blue - hypothermia is a risk - but I was sure just to keep moving.

(Don't worry about it saying Clare Sheppard below that photo, thats my friend who facebook'ed it!)

One comedy moment was when we had to crawl under a skip, I crawled in one end fine, but when I tried to crawl out the other end I couldn't make it through due to my boobs being too big LOL I had to reverse and go out the way I came in. There were lots of crawling type obstacles, a lot where you had to commando crawl, hence the boobs got very muddy ....

There were also a lot of climbing obstacles but with lots of mud around it was really hard to grip with my hands so I did a lot of hauling myself up and letting myself down by throwing my whole arm over the top. I didn't realise until after I'd had a shower just how many bruises I had ....

And then of course there's the medal and beanie that all finishers get. I've got a few running medals but have to say I really felt I'd earned this one!

3. Back to more sedentary pastimes - after reading this post of Amy's I decided to give sock-knitting a bash. Like Amy I'm following the sock-a-long by Christine who is also known as WinwickMum, but so far I've only got as far as doing a tension square. It's the first time I've ever knitted with 4-ply and I am loving it, I love how soft and light the resulting fabric is, and I can't wait to get going on an actual sock. 

And of course I had to jump the gun and buy some more sock yarn - which came with a free pattern sheet too. Can you see the sparkly bits in the pink one - glittery socks! How fabulous!

4. Another thing I want to share with you is some of Little Man's drawings. He's actually 13 now so not so little, so I think I need to start calling him Mr13 (nicking Meredith of Mereknits idea). Anyway despite not choosing Art as an option for GCSE, Mr13 is pretty artistic. We think he gets this from my Dad who was a pretty great artist (he was an architect), I'll share some of his pictures some time too. Anyway here are Mr13's drawings, they are in the Manga style which is a form of Japanese animation. Aren't they gorgeous ? I just adore the eyes.

5. I got a Fitbit for Christmas and am trying to hit 10,000 steps each day. And what better way than to go out on a dog-walk in the rain with Pixie and Little Tomboy. That's them this afternoon, a lovely end to the week.

They are best friends these two, always playing, running, and snuggling on the sofa. Sooo sweet.

That's it from me for today, hope you all have a lovely weekend,

Jillxo