Icy, red and preparing for holiday!

It's been a long time since I've posted a Treasury screen shot, so to break the drought, I give you:

Icy
by The Fuzzy Monkey

The Fuzzy Monkey has a shop full of the sweetest felted bowls embellished with buttons, stars and flowers and a cute range of knitted vases. I particularly like this little bowl:

fuzzy red felted wool bowl with three white amaryllis flowers $15

We're off on our hols to Crete on Tuesday and the flurry of finding long forgotten summery clothes has begun- I've rediscovered a fab DKNY dress from years ago which has made me happy, it's long, black, sleeveless, fitted with a tight top and a flared bottom with a zip all the way up the front, it's really comfortable and looks pretty smart, it's a bit faded now, but I think it will be coming along for the trip.....

Off out into town to play with my new little 50mm lens which I bought last weekend and haven't really used yet - I hope the rain stays away.

Mackerel on the bbq.

Fwd: BBQ mackerel., originally uploaded by Eyeshoot Photography.

Mum phoned this morning (well at 11.00) when we were still in our dressing gowns, Peter snoozing and me at my computer having just printed of a print to post to the USA on Monday (I do like to wake up to a sale) to ask if we fancied bbq mackerel for lunch. After considering the proposition for about five seconds we got our acts together and the day begun.

A quick trip into town resulted in my lovely new and much desired Nikon 50mm f/1.4 lens to replace and upgrade my similar but slightly lacking 1.8 version of the same. Adam will be pleased that I won't be constantly borrowing his!

Then off to mum's garden in a rare show of properly summery weather. Wine was uncharacteristically refused after our excesses last night and the shiny silvery fishes were slapped on the barbie bursting with bushes of rosemary and lashings of garlic. This was a first time cooking experiment and despite losing most of the skin after the first turning due to not oiling the bars, the results were delicious especially with the flesh liberally sprinkled with Maldon salt, freshly ground black pepper and a good squeeze of lemon juice. The result was very yummy and the rescued bits of skin had crisped up to perfection. I suspect we'll be doing it again!

Contemplating the View.

Mow Cop, originally uploaded by Eyeshoot Photography.

After our visit to Little Moreton Hall (see previous post for picture) we pottered down the road to Mow Cop which is a castle on a hill in Staffordshire. It was built as a summerhouse in 1754 for Randle Wilbraham I of Rode Hall. It's an imposing structure although there's not much left of it!

We had a good scramble around walking off some of the food we'd noshed at Little Moreton, it's not a great walk, only a very short climb up to the top but the views are great.

Here's Laura sitting on a rock to the side of the ruin contemplating the dramatic vista below.

Little Moreton Hall

Little Moreton Hall, originally uploaded by Eyeshoot Photography.

It's been ages since I last blogged, life's been getting in the way but today I got around to uploading some pictures from the last couple of weekends to Flickr so here's one of them.

We visited the stunning Little Moreton Hall in Cheshire with friends last weekend, it's one of the National Trust's smaller properties, in fact, I think it's pretty much the perfect size for a Sunday visit. It's small enough that you don't get bored with looking at too much stuff and it's basic enough and not full of precious pieces to make the staff a bit less paraoid about you getting close to things - there's not much to break.

We had a very nice country style lunch in the tiny tearoom, pottered around tagging on to the end of a tour, sat in the grounds eating ice cream while being hassled and hassling the masses of ducks.

A perfect Sunday's entertainment!