Project 365+1 Days 36 - 42

Earlier today I tried to get all of this week's photos uploaded to Flickr, but for some reason it wouldn't let me log in so I'll have to have a mass uploading session later in the week.

I quite like using my Project 365+1 photos to summarise my week, so I decided to make a collage of all of the January pictures. Hopefully I can do something similar for each month so I've got all of the pictures in twelve little groups.

My month in pictures

And onto the photos from this week...

Sunday I found myself craving chocolate. So when Mr. Click went out on an errand, I hinted that some chocolate might be a welcome treat. 'Hint' is maybe a little bit too subtle, I probably said something more along the lines of "I've been craving chocolate all week and I really, REALLY, think you should buy some before you think of coming home" but you know, whatever.

Either way, my hinting clearly worked:

Day 36: Double Chocolate

I should probably add here that they weren't both for me, and I do still have a significant lump of mine left because I'm not that much of a piggy.

Monday evening was largely spent ploughing on with the OU work I needed to be doing for my assignment. After noticing the colour-coding system going on with my course books I decided that I should also select my reading material to suit as well, okay, maybe it was just the next book on my obsessive-compulsively organised bookshelf. Whatever the reason, I started on The Perfect Storm, a book I'd been planning to read for several years.

Day 37: Odd One Out

So I snapped a picture of my rather impressive stack of books. I have to say that the green one in the middle (beneath the DVD case) is actually pretty good for a set course text. I've spent this week reading it in my lunch breaks at work and underlining copious amounts of it in pencil to reference in my assignment. Much better than the set text assigned for the first half of this course.

Another of my Day Zero Projects has been to buy some wool with the intention of actually making something with it (rather than spending an obscene amount on a 'good deal' and then stuffing it in a box because there's not enough of it to make anything worth making). In order to complete this task I thought I had better clear out some of the wool that I've had sitting in the spare bedroom in a big old double duvet box.

This thing was massive, about 2ft by 1ft and I was convinced that it was only about half-full with wool, surely the rest of the space in there was taken up by random junk, I could never have accumulated that much wool. Turns out, I had.

Day 38: A Big Tangle

And this is just a fraction of it! My new plan is to get knitting and use some of it up. I'm also ripping out a bunch of random things that I've started and lost the patterns for. Anything which looks too useless may get bundled up and eBayed or something. My weekend plans for a future weekend are going to include weighing and measuring just how much I've got before sorting it all into boxes and bags for easier storage. Fun!

As I said, a large portion of this week has been spent studying in one form or another. It's not always been easy, especially when your pets decide to help:

Day 39: Hitting The Books

This is Bell, deeply engrossed in my set book which I had been making notes on shortly before she decided to help. Holly and Ivy both enjoy 'helping' me keep track of my pens, while Carol likes to nibble the edges of the pages to show how far I've gotten through the book. (Who needs bookmarks when you've got rats?) On a related note, the girls are getting much better at being photographed, Ivy is a bit nervous of the flash (and they all get a bit jumpy at the sound of my DSLR) but this makes me happy because they're all so cute, I'm hoping I can get some nice photos of them all soon.

It was one of those weeks where at times I was reaching for something to photograph for 365+1. Mainly because most of my time this week has been spent working on my OU stuff. We get home in the evening, I pull out the books, we get the girls out and watch Spooks. Not really very many options for photos.

Day 40: Book and Brooch

But I'm still trying to find something that actually relates to the day in one way or another. For example, Day 40 is a photo of the book that Mr. Click got and was about to start reading that night (which he did virtually as soon as I finished using it for my photo). Perched on top of it is a little brooch that a friend gave me earlier that day. I used to collect all sorts of butterfly jewellery (most of which I still have but no longer wear), I'm thinking this one will look nice on my denim jacket which I normally wear through the summer months.

Day 41: A Blank Page

I finally made a start on actually writing my assignment out, beyond the ever-so-helpful notes. In preparation for it, I put off the actually writing of the first draft for as long as I could, I spent the whole evening stalling - rereading bits of the course books, making extra notes, taking an hour long super hot bath and then taking photos of all my stuff ready to go. Once I actually started it, it was relatively painless and by the time I gave it up for the night I was only 600 words away from the end.

I'm still yet to type it out, edit it and come up with a fitting conclusion, as well as changing my placeholder references such as "[Someone] says blah blah blah [ref p.31]" which makes sense in my notes but isn't particularly academic in its general formation. I'm ever-so-slightly paranoid that one day I'm going to forget to correct these bits and will submit the wrong version of the assignment.

And yesterday was just lovely. Up and out the house for a Red Cross meeting, we picked up pizza for lunch as a little treat and then headed home for a film and to fill up. Then a bit of OU work (the final 600 words of the aforementioned assignment). By the evening we'd watched another film and spent an age with the girls running around the sofa with us. We were craving a bit of hot chocolate but hadn't bothered picking any milk up while were were out earlier in the day, so Mr. Click improvised with a wartime equivalent made with the powdered milk we use for breadmaking. It wasn't bad at all.

Day 42: Wartime Hot Chocolate

This week is set to be fun. There's a day off work and a shopping trip tomorrow, I'm quite looking forward to that, even if I have had to go for a hospital appointment as well. I'm on one of my favourite shifts at work and I'm getting my assignment finished for submission on Thursday (so expect some more OU snaps during the coming Project 365+1 bunch). I also have coursework to do for the course I'm doing at work, thankfully there's not a lot left to be done so I'll get that done once I've finished my OU stuff.

And my father-in-law is off for his knee replacement surgery at the weekend as well. So it's going to be a busy week all round.