curiouswombat | Sunday Pic Spam.

I've had a lovely weekend - busy, but really nice. Apart from the trolley-shopping yesterday, I sorted out a lot of my craft stuff and threw some stuff out, found and printed out words for the Advent candles in church because - meep! next Sunday is the first in Advent, then I put some of the children's work from Sunday School last week together into booklets for them, did some washing, cleaned the kitchen - all very domesticated.

Then, today, after church there was a quick trip to M&S, then to the garden centre (including a roast pork and apple bap for lunch), an afternoon making cards, reading, doing some beta-ing (a pleasure when it is well written and easy to read!), cooking stir fry turkey with veg and rice noodles... more reading.

I was just uploading the pictures for this post when D-d rang and we gossiped for over a hour (hence time of posting). One or two of you might recognise that the one thing not mentioned there is... writing. I am writing the current thing, slowly, just... not so far this weekend!

Under the cut for this week is a picture of a seat surely made for the Rohirrim, a rather softly pink sunset, and a picture of one of the things I have done over the weekend - for the pictures

Isn't this wonderful? It was at the Garden centre - I spotted it whilst eating in the Garden Centre conservatory;

Now some pictures taken on Friday afternoon at Ballaugh Old Church - where I sat in the car and, using our new computerised notes and 3G technology, wrote up the notes of the patients I had just seen.

The high winds over much of the past week have brought down a number of branches -

This is the 'back view' of the old church-

As you can see it is very simply built of local stone. Here is a close-up of that weather vane, with the date on it -

That isn't the year the church was built, though - 1717 was just the year it had major renovation work done and a new front porch added.... The sundial beside the stile into the churchyard is more modern -

The inscription tells us that it is "The gift of Thos. Moughton, 1813".

Inside the church looks very like all our other small parish churches, to be honest -

Complete with the almost obligatory thousand year old carved stone -

This one tells us that "Thorlaf, the son of Thorjolf erected this cross to his son Olave." Possibly even more interesting, if you are getting blasé about ancient crosses, is what you can see behind it - that is a stone font set into the window sill, with a carved stone cover. I don't think I've ever seen another one quite like it.

By the time I got back outside the sun was setting with soft shades of pink -

The last couple of pictures were taken late this afternoon, they show that I have got some of my Christmas cards made -and that they are quite simple this year (I remember saying that last year, too!), and that I was all nice and cosy as I didn't put the light on when I sat to drink my coffee and read the story I was beta-ing, but lit some candles just because I like them... the beauty of modern day on-screen reading - you can do it by very old fashioned lighting!