Another Bloggy Book Swap

A while ago I signed up to take part in The Emerald Dove's Blogger Book Swap. I took part in one last year organised by the lovely Rosie (from A Rosie Outlook) and it was great fun choosing what books to buy so I thought I'd give it a go again.

 

I was paired with Cat from Through A Cat's Eyes and managed to find a book I really enjoyed based on the life story of 70s child sensation, Lena Zavaroni from the Isle of Bute in Scotland. I remember learning all about her back when I studied A Level Psychology and when I worked in the local library I spotted Andrew O'Hagan's novel based on her life.

 

Anyway, I packaged the book up and sent it on it's merry way up north to Scotland along with some little chocolates to enjoy. Stupidly I forgot to take any pictures at all of the book I sent but pop over to Cat's blog to see what she received.

 

My package arrived earlier this week and Cat had chosen the perfect book for me - Dewey by Vicki Myron!

 

It's all about a cat (called Dewey, fairly obviously) who lives in a small town library in America and gets into all sorts of trouble whilst winning the hearts of all the borrowers. She'd spotted that I used to work in the library and thought that would suit me, and she was right. Not only am I a fan of libraries themselves but I'm also a fan (albeit a very sad one) of the Dewey Decimal System. It's a brilliant way of classifying books!

 

Books Swaps are great fun - if you ever spot one running on someone's blog, they're well worth signing up for!

 

52 Lists - Your Spring To-Do List

This week's prompt is to list your spring to-do list...

I've gone with the idea of spring being March, April and May and seem to have ended up with a to-do list that looks a bit like my weekly lists!



March
Visit the West Somerset Railway's Spring Steam Gala
Weekend holiday booked in Blue Anchor at the end of the month
Remember Andrew's godson's 4th bithday at the end of the month


April
 Plant seed potatoes
Sort out flowerbeds and back garden
Sign up for April's #blogclub (12th April)
Tickets booked for Jon Richardson at Weston Super Mare Playhouse on 1st
Remember B's birthday on 9th
Check to see what tickets are on sale for Edinburgh Fringe on 10th
Carnival club meeting on 13th
Remember to send off Selwood Steam Rally entry form by 18th
Holiday in North Wales over Easter
7th Wedding Anniversary on 21st!
Carnival club quiz night on 25th


May
Sort out hanging baskets for back garden
Barbeque at some point if the weather is warm enough?
Wedding evening do to attend on 3rd
Visitign Carters Steam Fair at Pinkney's Green (near Maidenhead) on 10th
Carnival club meeting on 11th
Check to see what tickets are on sale for Edinburgh Fringe on 13th
Tickets booked for Rich Hall at the Tobacco Factory Bristol on 14th
Andrew's birthday on 19th
Tickets booked for National Theatre Live performance at Frome's Merlin Theatre on 22nd
Selwood Steam Rally on 24th, 25th and 26th



What have you got planned for spring?
 

This post is part of Ema's (Made in Hunters) 52 Lists Project

For a full list of all the other lovely bloggy people taking part, visit Scarlett's site (WorkRestPlayLove) for a nosy!

The Midweek Hop - Time Goes By

Three music videos on a theme...

(inspired by Desmond Carrington's 'The Music Goes Round')

'Ami Continental 2' 1962 Jukebox

 

 

This weeks theme is...Time Goes By

Inspired by the clocks springing forward in the UK on Saturday into Sunday night. Don't forget everyone!



1. Rock Around The Clock by Bill Haley and His Comets


The classic 'clock and time' themed rock and roll song!
'Rock Around The Clock' first entered the chart on 17th January 1955 reaching Number 17 but later re-entered the chart on 14th October reaching Number 1.


2. Good Timin' by Jimmy Jones


Here's hoping you all don't forget to 'spring forward' and have good timing on Sunday :-)
'Good Timin'' entered the chart on 16th June 1960 reaching Number 1.


3. Turn! Turn! Turn! by The Byrds

Just remember, 'spring forward, fall back'...

'Turn! Turn! Turn!' entered the chart on 11th November 1965 reaching Number 26.

 

 

Happy listening!

A Photo Every Hour - Saturday 22nd March

The third photo an hour challenge of the year fell on Saturday 22nd March. The lovely Jane (from Is That You Darling) set the date and it's always great fun following everyone else on Instagram using the #photoanhour hashtag. If you haven't done one before, give it a go next month, it's great fun (even if you think your day's mundane) and on the day, it really is the more the merrier.

 

Saturday 22nd March wasn't quite as exciting as Saturday 22nd February - but we did manage to tick off rather a large amount of jobs in and around the house!

 

 

9am - A large amount of sunlight streaming through the windows, even though the forecast was to be rain!

 

10am - Bacon and onion sizzling away in the pan, ready for a Bacon and Eggs Kedgeree breakfast.

 

 

11am - Off down the local high street with a list of little jobs.

 

12pm - These cows were happily munching away over at Farringtons Farm Shop.

 

 

1pm - Farringtons Farm Shop also contains a little hair salon (Pigtails) so I popped in for a quick trim and tidy up.

2pm - Back home and carrying on with the last bit of kitchen cleaning - sorting out my mountain of storage boxes (and yep, those are all Chinese takeaway boxes...)

 

 

3pm - Andrew's out in the garden pruning an elder tree that's spent far too long growing in the wrong place.

 

4pm - I baked a few fairy cakes for Andrew and his parents, who'd joined us to help with the tree-chopping.

 

 

5pm - This was my music of choice for tidying and sorting (Gwen Stefani, Muse and Glenn Miller). I'm not sure what someone would make of that mixture!

6pm - We chucked a load of bits of tree into the chimenea, it's one quick (and warm) way to get rid of it!

 

 

7pm - Back inside and finishing off the last bit of a blog post that should have been online about 3pm...

8pm - Trying to choose what to watch first on our hard drive over dinner...

 

 

9pm - We went with the fantastically funny 'The Last Leg' (I think it's back on TV later in the year, yay!)

10pm - And it's beginning to get slightly worrying that every single month's Photo an Hour challenge ends with the same sort of picture (I'm only 31, not 61!) :-)

 

 

If you fancy giving it a go next month, hop on over to Jane's blog to see when the April's date will be. If you think you're likely to forget, let me know and I'll tweet you a reminder the day before!
 

This Weekend at the Duckpond

We have mostly been...

 

Ticking - off lots of little jobs around the house and in town. Mundane things like picking up a present for Andrew's 4 year old godson, getting a new watch battery and filling in some entry forms for this summer's steam rally season.

 

Pruning - an elder tree that's growing too tall and in the wrong place in our back garden.

Ordering - some new bedroom furniture from Ikea. Our house has four bedrooms; the bedroom we use is slightly small but has built in wardrobes, the one we want to use is an en-suite but has absolutely no furniture so we designed our own layout and matched the stuff from Ikea to fit. This doesn't actually mean we'll be living in our lovely new bedroom anytime soon though - what's more likely to happen is that we'll have a pile of boxed-up flatpack furniture stacked up in the bedroom for about 9 months!

 

Getting - a long overdue haircut. It doesn't seem dramatically different to what I usually have (what can I say, I'm not that adventurous when it comes to hair) but it's certainly a lot tidier and doesn't look quite as much like I've been dragged through the proverbial bush backwards.

 

 

Participating - in the lovely Jane's (from Is That You Darling) March Photo an Hour challenge.
Full round up to follow tomorrow :-)



Baking - some chocolate chip cookies courtesy of the one of the lovely gifts I was sent as part of the Thrifty Gift Swap last Christmas. I thought it seemed rather appropriate to cook 'bloggy biscuits' to celebrate the blog's first birthday!

 

 

 

What did you get up to at the weekend?

Why I'm A Bad Blogger

So...exactly one year ago tomorrow, I sat down with my laptop and tentatively took the first steps into the world of blogging.

 

I've loved writing, photographing, creating and publishing posts; when I started duck in a dress, I thought it would just be Andrew and my friend M who'd be reading - I never dreamed that so many other people would be interested in my life.

 

I've learnt a lot in the last year and met some fabulous other bloggers, but I'm also very aware that a lot of the things I do (or don't do) probably make me what would be known as "a bad blogger".
 

 

This would include...

 

Munching on my food before photographing it (see above for a perfect example!)

Not tweeting enough

Commenting on other people's blogs about two weeks after everyone else

Scheduling and then rearranging blog posts beacuse I'm too lazy to actually write them

Continuing with a weekly feature which I know only a handful of people actually read

Letting public holidays, celebrations and national awareness weeks slip by without even mentioning them

Never managing to actually be free to take part in the #lbloggers chat on Sunday evenings
(although this week I stumbled on the fact that they have a Wednesday night session as well, yay!)

Not getting around to setting up a Facebook page for absolutely ages
(although as of last weekend that's done and ticked off now!)

Taking photos on my phone in artifical light

Blogging about topics that would probably be seen as quite niche (vintage lorries and IVF anyone?)
 

 

 

But in the year I've been sharing with you, one thing I've learnt is that I don't mind - I might well do all of these things and more, but for every blogger out there, your own blog is your own space to interpret and use however you like.
So what if you forget to photograph your food or to blog one night? As long as blogging in whatever way you like makes you happy, then that's absolutely fine.

 

And as duck in a dress grows another year older, if other lovely people decide to join me along the way, then that's just flipping grand.

52 Lists - Things Beside My Bed

This weeks theme is all about what's beside your bed.
In our bedroom my dressing table is next to my side of the bed so that area always seems like a right mess and probably not the sort of thing any decent blogger would photograph.

But the one thing that's always beside my bed is my library books 'to be read' pile....

You might have spotted in my 'A-Z of Books' post a while back, that my worst bookish habit is taking out my quota of library books and then just never getting round to actually reading them for months on end.

So this is what my TBR pile looks like at the moment (complete with when I first took them out from the library)...

The History Room by Eliza Graham
(first borrowed on 16th November 2013 from Street Library)
The blurb on the back says this book is a "gripping mystery" and it involves private schools, war and a girl "determined to discover the culprit".  I think I chose it beacuse I thought it would be a bit like Kate Morton or Diane Setterfield, both authors I quite like.

I Can Make You Hate by Charlie Brooker
(first borrowed on 15th February 2014 from Street Library)
I like Charlie Brooker on TV (my first ever tweet was actually a retweet of his) and a whole book of him ranting seemed like a good idea. Andrew wants to read this one after me as well.

A Year of Doing Good by Judith O'Reilly
(first borrowed on 15th February 2014 from Street Library)
This looked interesting just from the front cover (tea and flowers) and the premise doing one good deed each day for a year sounded like fun, although the back cover does warn that she runs into lots of problems being good!

Trains and Lovers by Alexander McCall Smith
(first borrowed on 8th March 2014 from Clevedon Library)
I've read quite a lot of Alexander McCall Smith's stuff (I love his Isabel Dalhousie series) and this is a fairly short story about four strangers meeting on a train from London to Edinburgh, all with their own stories and experiences. The cover looks like the book could be entertaining, although it probably should be on some kind of Valentine's Day themed display.

Christmas at the Cupcake Cafe by Jenny Colgan
(first borrowed on 23rd November 2013 from Midsomer Norton Library)
I took this out back in November thinking "ooh that'd be good book to read over the Christmas holiday" - it's still in my TBR pile.

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein
(first borrowed on 23rd November 2013 from Midsomer Norton Library)
I'd seen this recommended in a few places; the book's written from the point of view of the family's dog, Enzo looking back at his life story. It sounds like such a lovely idea, moving and uplifting all in one.

The Knot by Mark Watson
(first borrowed on 20th October 2012 from Taunton Library)
 I like Mark Watson as a comedian so I thought I'd give one of his books a go, all about a wedding photographer who searching for his own happy ever after.

The Shadow Wife by Diane Chamberlain
(first borrowed on 20th July 2013 from Junction 3 Library, Bristol)
I've read several of Diane Chamberlain's novels, they usually follow some
 kind of moral dilemma and the families involved - this one is all about illicit romances, unborn babies and brain injuries.

One Hundred Names by Cecelia Ahern
(first borrowed on 20th July 2013 from Junction 3 Library, Bristol)
Again, another author I've read several books from and enjoyed. The blurb on the back describes a journalist who's lost her way then discovers a list of one hundred stranger's names and sets out to trace all their stories.

Move Along, Please by Mark Mason
(first borrowed on 15th February 2014 from Street Library)
I'm quite a fan of travel books, especially ones around Britain and this one is all about Mark Mason's journey across the nation using local bus services. I like travelling by bus myself (there's nothing better than a long journey where you can stare out of the window) so I thought this book would be really interesting. The author's route also takes him through a few local towns and places I've visited so I'm quite intrigued to see how he gets on!

There Is No Dog by Meg Rosoff
(first borrowed on 23rd November 2013 from Midsomer Norton Library)

I really liked Meg Rosoff's books, 'How I Live Now', 'Just In Case' and 'What I Was' and I've heard lots of good things about this one. It tells the tale of the seven days of creation from the point of view of a hormonal teenage boy just on the brink of falling in love - certainly an interesting idea!




Have you read any of them? Which one should I start with?

 

This post is part of Ema's (Made in Hunters) 52 Lists Project

For a full list of all the other lovely bloggy people taking part, visit Scarlett's site (WorkRestPlayLove) for a nosy!