Autumn Days (in words)

Today has been a beautiful autumn day...cool and crisp with lovely sunny skies. Whilst it isn't my favourite season (I don't really know if I have one to be honest), there are certainly many things that I appreciate about it, and I thought I'd share a few of them today:

• The beautiful colours of the autumn leaves...I adore the reds and oranges, yellows and browns and hearing their crunch when they're underfoot is music to my ears!!
• Halloween!! Whilst I'm no longer a child myself, and don't often celebrate the occasion in a big way, I still love lots of things about the date. Seeing little trick or treaters in cute costumes, and sometimes getting the chance to dress up myself, pumpkin lanterns which add an eerie glow to many a house, eating themed food...all fabulous in my book!!
• Chilly autumn mornings when you can see your breath and the crisp, bright days that follow. I do know that we get rainy autumn days too...but I'm choosing to ignore that fact (hell, it's my blog and I can do what I like!!)
• Buying new autumn clothes and rediscovering old favourites...I love wrapping up in cardigans and am looking forward to being able to wear my cosy boots again!!
• Conkers...As a child, the start of the conker season was one of the main heralds of autumn for me, alongside the start of a new school year of course, and I still love collecting a few of them when I'm out walking. However, even though these days I'm particularly discerning and only pick the shiniest and most beautiful looking ones, I've still got quite a few and I'm not quite sure where I should put them or what I should do with them!!
• The smoky scent of bonfires and fireworks...Even though I hate fireworks and so am not overly fond of Bonfire Night, I love the smells associated with it, and the smoky, slightly foggy atmosphere that lingers for a day or two afterwards. And being the food lover that I am, I also look forward to such treats as parkin (a dark and sticky ginger cake made with treacle and oats) and treacle and cinder toffees :-)
• Dark autumn evenings spent watching TV or reading and curling up near the warm fire (I would describe it as roaring but that would be an exaggeration considering our fire is gas powered lol!!)
• Autumn baking and cooking...This is the first autumn that I've really got into baking/cooking and I'm looking forward to making lots of seasonal treats including parkin, halloween biscuits, gingerbread, soup and lots of apple and pumpkin based cakes. I can't wait!!

And those are a few of my favourite autumn things!! What are yours?? I'd love to hear from you :-)

Till next time...

PS: I was intending to include some pretty pictures with this post, but we heart it is being slow and I'm getting impatient, so you're just going to have to wait till another day! I'll post an autumn days picture post soon, I promise!

Just a quickie...

because I think I'm going to go mad if I go any longer without blogging! I can't believe that after managing to blog every day in August, I've now gone nearly two weeks without posting. To put it simply, my absence can be put down to two main reasons: one, my laptop is away being repaired at the moment, and so my sisters and I have been sharing the family PC between us...not ideal at all, especially now K has gone back to school, and Amy has started college and they both need to use a computer for homework. And two, despite being off work myself, I've been really rather busy this week as I've spent the majority of my days jobhunting. I'll explain in more detail in another post, but basically I've come to a point where I really want a steady income. And that means getting a full time job, as opposed to relying on short term supply teaching work. As regular readers of my blog will know, I've been searching for a long term teaching post for over a year and a half now, and have so far been unsuccessful. So I've decided to broaden my horizons, and have recently been applying for jobs in a range of sectors, not just education. As I've said, more details will follow...I just wanted to give a little insight as to where I'm at right now. Fingers crossed that I'll be back to more regular posting quite soon...the girls have bought themselves a new laptop today, so I should have more use of the PC and I'm also determined to get my jobhunting routine a bit more organised, and maybe even draw up a schedule so I can allocate specific blocks of time to it, as I feel that it's all a bit messy at the mo. And I spend far too much time procrastinating, as always!!

Anyway, till next time...