This week's Weekword will be chosen by...

...Sally at Diario! Have a look at her blog to see what she chooses!

Weekword: Christmas!

I was in charge of choosing this week's Weekword, and I chose Christmas! I love Christmas - I love all the decorations and festivities and especially the food and drink! This year is a bit different in my family - we'll have a Finn with us, and they celebrate on Christmas Eve, so we'll have a Finnish Christmas on the 24th and an English Christmas on the 25th!

So here are a few photos of my favourite things about Christmas...

The decorations on my little tree:



Christmas snow-capped biscuits:



The lovely sparkly Christmas lights near my house:



And finally, our dearly departed dog Basil, who loved Christmas (especially opening presents!)



Have a look at the following blogs to see who else is playing!

Silver Linings 4 Me
Sow and Sew
carola bARTz
Domestic Scribbles
La Vie Quotidienne
Simply Cool Stuff
Musings in Mayhem
TEXTILSPANIELN
Mandyland

Weekword: CHRISTMAS!

Joye asked me to think up this week's Weekword, and I just couldn't resist choosing Christmas as it's rapidly approaching!

If you'd like to participate, just leave a comment on this post. Then on Friday, post your Weekword contribution on your own blog. I'll post a list of all the participants so that we can all see what everyone comes up with!

Weekword: Synaesthesia

Joye suggested this week's word - synaesthesia. If you're thinking 'you what??' (which is quite understandable!) it's a sort of condition where people see different words or numbers as different colours or shapes. A sort of mixing of the senses. Someone might hear the word 'happy' and see yellow, for example.

I didn't think I had it, until I happened to mention to someone that, for me, words have personalities. Anything beginning with 'st' is frowning and stern. Anything beginning with 'sm' is nasty and slimy and creepy. But words beginning with 'ch' are quite relaxed and happy. And apparently that counts as synaesthesia!

I'm hosting Weekword next week, so come back on Monday to see which word I'll choose!

Weekword: Lacuna

Carmen chose this week's word - lacuna. It means a gap or a hole, and as soon as I saw it was this week's Weekword this photo popped into my head. It isn't even a recent one - I took it on my country walk last month - but I really like it and I couldn't think of anything better! I can't believe just a month ago the leaves were on the trees and the sun was out!

Weekword: Rock

I'm late with my Weekword homework! I may have sneakily changed the date of this post to Friday, but it's actually Sunday. But I have mitigating circumstances - my sister came to stay on Friday and I've had a really horrible cold, so I haven't had much time or inclination for blogging.

Anyway, on to Weekword. Maria chose 'rock' as this week's word and it was a bit of a challenge! When I was little I used to collect rocks, pebbles and crystals - every time we went to the beach I'd spend ages finding interesting rocks (luckily one of our favourite beaches, Seaton, was made entirely of pebbles) and looking for fossils, and if I found a rock I liked in the garden or the playground or just out and about, it'd go straight into my pocket and into my collection. When we left primary school, everyone in the class was allowed to choose an Eyewitness Guides book as a leaving present, and I chose Crystal & Gem.

Unfortunately I don't have my childhood rock collection now, and living in a city it's quite hard to find interesting rocks to take photos of! So I thought 'I know, there's a sweet shop down the road - they'll have sticks of rock and I can take a photo of those!' But the sweet shop didn't have any rock. This was the closest thing I could find...

Weekword: November

Carola chose this week's word, and very appropriate it is too seeing as we're smack bang in the middle of the month!

So far, November has looked like this most of the time:



And of course, one of the major events in November is Remembrance Day - in the UK we mark what used to be known as Armistice Day (the end of WWI) on November 11th, and Remembrance Sunday on the nearest Sunday to the 11th (this year it's the 14th). The Poppy Appeal is the Royal British Legion's Remembrance Day fundraising initiative and for the first two weeks of November you'll see a lot of people wearing poppies.



But as we get further into November, these are the sights that start springing up. I think all the London Christmas lights are now on, so the countdown to the big day is definitely beginning!

Weekword: Abundance

Christine chose this week's Weekword and it's a great one!

'Abundance' immediately makes me think of food - it's quite apt for this time of year, because it makes me think of harvests and apple trees groaning with fruit. But abundance isn't something that often features in my own kitchen, as I'm cooking for one most of the time! This weekend, though, I'll be cooking for six or seven people and there is currently an abundance of fruit in my house - I'm planning to make Jamie Oliver's baked fruit so it's plums and nectarines a-go-go round here at the moment!

This week's Weekword...

Christine has chosen this week's Weekword, which is...ABUNDANCE.

If you fancy participating (you just need to post something relating to the word on Friday) then head over to Christine's blog and leave her a comment! And come back here on Friday to see what I come up with...

Weekword: Joy

This week's Weekword was chosen by Sally at Sowandsew. I took this photo of my sister eating a burger - and she was truly joyful at this particular moment, because my mum had found gluten-free rolls that were actually soft and light and didn't taste like stale bricks! I don't think she'd eaten a burger in a bun for a very long time - I think you can tell!

Weekword: Temptation

This week's Weekword was chosen by Mandyland - and it's a good one! In June I decided I was just too heavy - I wasn't overweight, but I was heavier than I'm comfortable with. I knew I'd been 'treating myself' to things like cake and cheese and pizza and wine far too often, and I'd been using running as an excuse to fill my face with pasta at every opportunity. The upshot being that I was 11 stone 3 and Something Had To Be Done. I'm not one for denying myself and I'm not one for obsessive calorie counting, so I signed up to a website called Food Focus which does all the hard work for you. It gives you a daily net calorie goal based on your height, your starting weight, your activity level and how much you want to lose per week. Then you log the food you eat (there's a huge database of foods and you can add new foods to your own personal list of favourites) and the exercise you do, and you can keep track of whether you're meeting your calorie goal. Since I started I've lost around a pound and a half a week and am now at 10 stone 1 1/2, just a pound and a half off my ultimate target of 10 stone!

Obviously, while I'm not denying myself the odd treat, I am being more careful than I used to be - which means resisting temptation! Most of the time my willpower is pretty strong - but then every now and then something like someone bringing amazing raspberry macarons to work happens, and I can resist no more...! Luckily everything's good for you in moderation, especially macarons.

Weekword: Senses

I've been so busy this week that it was really difficult trying to come up with something for this week's Weekword, which was suggested by Christine at Silver Linings 4 Me. In the end, I decided to use my night out in Piccadilly as inspiration, because going to one of the touristy bits of London certainly is an assault on the senses! So we have a delicious apple and melon martini to represent taste, me in a phone box (geek alert: it's actually the prototype of the original K2 phone box, which stands just inside the entrance to the Royal Academy) to represent sound, the interestingly textured panelled wall of the Royal Institution's Time and Space Bar to represent touch, and Piccadilly Circus in all its glory to represent sight. Trying to represent smell in a photo proved slightly too challenging!

The next Weekword will be chosen by Mandyland, so pop over there if you want to join in!

Weekword: Ten

Domestic Scribbles chose this week's word - ten.

My first thought was, seeing as October is the tenth month and it's also my birthday month, to find a photo of my tenth birthday. My mum always used to make wonderful cakes for our birthdays, so I confidently assumed there'd be a photo of me blowing out the candles on a fantastic birthday cake. Unfortunately, 1991 was the year I chose a local swimming pool for my birthday party, and we only have a few photos of a soggy-looking me! So here's a photo of me aged ten instead.

Weekword: Comfort

Here's my contribution to the Weekword topic I suggested - 'comfort'. There's nothing I like more on a chilly Autumn evening (like this evening - it's been rather cold and windy today!) than snuggling up on the sofa with a blanket and my pompom slippers.



Domestic Scribbles is suggesting next week's word - head over to her blog and sign up!

This week's Weekword is...

...comfort.

Autumn is making itself known, and I like comforting things in Autumn. I like everything to be comfy and cosy and warm, to counteract the chilly air and darker evenings!

So...off you go! This week's participants are:

Domestic Scribbles
Sow and Sew
The Careless Thoughts of Uncle Montague
Silver Linings 4 Me
UpsidedownB
The Gift Shed
Creating Misericordia
The Silly Tail of a Biomouse
Diario
Textilspanieln

Looking forward to seeing what everyone comes up with on Friday! I'm giving Domestic Scribbles the task of coming up with next week's word!

Weekword

Completely forgot to say - if you want to join in with this week's Weekword, either leave a comment here or on my previous post.

I'll be back later with this week's word - got to get my thinking cap on!

Weekword: Curiosities

I signed up for Weekword - each week, a blogger suggests a word as a springboard, and people sign up and then post about that word on their own blogs. Emma at The Gift Shed suggested this week's word, which is 'curiosities'.

To be perfectly honest I sort of forgot about it and I ended up having a really busy week, so I feel a bit like I'm doing my homework at the last minute! Looking at other people's blog posts on the theme, it seems like a lot of people have collections of interesting bits and pieces. I don't have one of those, but I thought I'd take a few photos of some vaguely intriguing things from my house!

Next week I'm choosing the word, so make sure you check back on Monday to see what I come up with!



Firstly, we have a little mosaic flowerpot - I decorated it myself at the London Transport Museum's open evening, and I was commended on my artwork (!)



Secondly, an actual fossil which I found on the beach at Lyme Regis. My sister and I used to spend hours there trying to smash rocks apart with hammers in the hope of finding a beautifully preserved ammonite, but this teeny tiny creature is the only fossil I've ever found!



Thirdly, a little wooden box with buttons embedded in its sides. I actually bought this as a Christmas present a few years ago for one of the girls I was friends with at uni, but our planned Christmas meet-up never got organised and it was months before I saw her again - by that time it seemed silly to give her a Christmas present, so I ended up keeping the box.



And finally, a vase that was left behind in the flat by the previous tenant. I think it's strangely nice!