Bonnie tagged me with some Bookworm award-meme-thing that seems to just involve copying some words. My kind of meme. The logo is also an uncanny representation of me at work.

The rules say: Pass it on to five other bloggers (pfft), and tell them to open the nearest book to page 46. Write out the fifth sentence on that page, and also the next two to five sentences…The CLOSEST book, not your favourite, or most intellectual!

The closest book is the one I’m reading at the moment, which is sitting next to me on a chair, buried under that damn mohair scarf that still isn’t finished. The book is “The Settlers” by Wilhelm Moberg, book three in The Emigrant Novels, a saga of Swedish immigrants making a new life in North America. From page 46 …

“For several weeks they had hidden him under their barn floor. Three or four times a day they had carried food to him and later they had followed him to North America. The prophet from Biskopskulla had founded Bishop Hill, Illinois, where he intended to build the New Jerusalem. And Erik Janson had seemed to his followers as humanity’s great light, sent by God to restore Christianity. Here in America he would found a new and cleansed Lutheran Church.”

Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson of ABBA took these books, which are part of classic literature in Sweden and composed Kristina från Duvemåla, a musical that was highly successful in Sweden. Plans are afoot to bring an English-language production to life, but in the meantime the cast recording in Swedish has some amazing music and vocals. Just listen to this:

Another day where it gets to half past three and I notice that the light is beginning to fade, which in turn reminds me that I haven’t taken my photo for the day … and that it really would have been much wiser to have done it earlier in the day when it was still bright outside.

My weather widget is saying I’ll get some snow on Friday, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Surely everyone knows that our snow comes in April?

In the sitting room we have one of those fancy things that tells you not just the time, but also the temperature indoors and the temperature outdoors.

Of course, I can’t see this device from where I spend most of my day in my office. However I am able to rely on more natural methods to keep abreast of weather conditions. So going by the puffed-up size of the normally much more streamline starling I spied from my window, it was clearly cold enough for it to be a good idea to stay indoors with my feet on the radiator.

Lauren turned up this morning bearing birthday salutations and gifts. Gifts that required super-human strength to extricate them from the packaging, but which smelled very nice. I’m not sure what’s happened the rest of the day. With a bit of rain and wintery darkness outside I tend to switch off, even during the week, thinking that evening has come at half past three in the afternoon. And so just now I was to be found snoozing on a bean bag with The Simpsons on TV playing to an inattentive audience.

The plan for tonight involves a shower before snoozing in front of watching “Erin Brockovich” on TV and continuing to reknit the hat I wasn’t 100% happy with. And maybe rearranging that sentence so that the preposition isn’t at the end. Of course this is all somewhat dependent on the lethargy lifting … and I’m just not sure it can be bothered.

I had a craving for Lauren’s Rocky Road and then Lori shared her recipe for Rocky Road cake, so it seemed meant to be. Time to melt some chocolate and stir in some marshmallows and chopped up brazil nuts. I decided to make a slab like Lauren did, so at the minute there’s a very questionable-looking lumpy brown pile on a baking tray in the kitchen.

My bros (I’m trying to resist writing “and their hos”) have been here this evening for another birthday tea and John and I have been playing Little Big Planet on his Playstation. My biggest challenge is sometimes getting my thumb onto the right buttons, so that I stop just changing my character’s expression into a grimace and actually move along the screen … often into deadly spikes or a pile of explosives.

I haven’t been putting anything except my frondy carrot tops into the compost bin for a while as the bin was very full. Putting a few bricks on top has now pushed everything down about 8 inches, so I can start adding more. As well as the kitchen scraps from last night’s dinner I also added a wonderful-smelling bag of coffee grounds.

Leaving the lid off the bin to let the delicious coffee fumes spread a little, I moved onto the next job: harvesting the last of the carrots. Always a fun game as you can’t really tell what success you’ve had until you start digging. That big orange top might only extend half an inch down - and in two different directions. Or, as happened: the completely unassuming one in the middle, which hadn’t pushed its top far above ground, turned out to be a big fat 142g whopper.

All the carrots were dug up, cleaned and lined up for their photo shoot inside, which took, oh I don’t know A MILLION YEARS. Then I took their tops off, bunged them into the fridge and took the tops to the compost bin. I bent down to pick up a stray carrot frond from the grass and discovered that it was attached to a tiny 3-legged 2g carrot I’d evidently dropped. But I ain’t about to spend ANOTHER MILLION YEARS getting a photo, so you’ll just have take my word for it. Or come and look at it sitting on my desk looking like a little orange alien.

And like yesterday, I keep thinking it’s Friday. Bits of work done today, translations of reviews, transcripts of crazy people talking, bits of code updated, people emailed. And I keep leaving my daily photo until late afternoon when it’s getting dark outside and in.

The good news is though that there’s leftover no-cook lemon pie from yesterday.

06:37

beep beep - beep beep

My phone wakes me. I’ve been here before. A text from my dear cousin: “Happy birthday. Sorry so early, but some of us start work before 10am!”

Oh ha-di-ha.

09:50

John rings on the home line; I’ve turned the work phone over to the guys for the day. He wishes me a happy birthday and then says “that’s it”. “Oh, I wasn’t sure if you were about to say ‘can you just…?’”, I say. “No, I’m not going to make you do any work,” he replies. “It’s hard enough at the best of times.”

A little love and respect on one’s birthday is always nice. Or so I hear.

This is how I was earlier in the day, with two knitting needles, a crochet hook and yarn all being orchestrated in my hands. I’d dropped a stitch, found out how to pick it up, but evidently wasn’t doing something quite right. I tried several times picking up and making the loop, but eventually ended up with an extra stitch on the needle and the hole remained. So I went back a few rows to where life was good, managed to drop the correct extra stitch and then carried on without a problem - once all the stitches were back on the needle the right way round of course. Someone had better buy this damn hairy scarf when it’s finished.

It’s been raining most of the day - at times quite heavily. I’ve been here in my office. Content to let the outdoors be outdoors and me be indoors for today.