A Day of My Life in Pictures | November 2015

It’s been a while since my last Day of My Life in Pictures, and when I published that post, I HAD intended to do one every month – or every season, at least. 

Well, that obviously didn’t happen, but I do still like the idea of documenting random days for posterity, because how else will I one day be able to look back and remember what I used to eat for breakfast, and what colour my coffee cup was? EXACTLY, people. With that in mind, here’s another day of my life in pictures: namely, Sunday, November 8th, 2015…

Sometime in the morning: 

I wake up and reach for my phone, only to realise I forgot to plug it in to charge last night, and have woken up to what I think it’s fair to describe as everyone’s worst nightmare* – a 20% battery warning. OMG! I quickly connect the phone to the charger, then take the opportunity to grab a few more minutes in bed while I allow it to charge for a while. To pass the time, I take a couple of quick photos to document this whole ‘waking up’ business:

Looking back at the photos, I quickly realise three things:

01. Not only did I not charge my phone, I obviously haven’t replaced the battery on my watch either, because it sure ain’t 3:35. Or, at least, I HOPE not…

02. It’s WAY too dark and gloomy outside to be able to rely on my phone for photos, which means I’m going to have to lug what Terry and I affectionately refer to as “The Big Camera” around with me all day instead.

03. I look a bit like a ginger Elvis with that quiff I’ve got going on. Interesting.

Seeing as I’m not going to need the phone for my photos, I leave it charging and get out of bed, grabbing the DSLR on the way downstairs, where I let Rubin out:

Then I switch on the kettle, give Rubin his breakfast (which I didn’t photograph, because it was LITERALLY a dog’s dinner…) and spend the next twenty minutes messing around with the settings on the camera, and battling the indoor lighting (or lack thereof) to get this crappy photo of our coffee mugs:

(I also spend a fair bit of time wishing Terry’s mug was a bit more Pinterest worthy, but alas, it really isn’t. Since his transplant, he likes to make sure he keeps really hydrated, which means drinking his tea from the largest mug possible. Unfortunately, though, they don’t really seem to make cute mugs in size gigantic, so this one was all I could find. Er, I’m really over-explaining this, aren’t I? I’ll stop now…)

I take the coffee and tea back upstairs, and get back into bed to drink my coffee and tell Terry aaaalllll about the dream I had last night in which I had five white cats, one black cat, and two tabby cats, and they were, like, all over the house?!

Terry is not impressed by this:

Neither is Rubin.

Terry is adamant that my dream is NOT, in fact, a sign that we should buy a bunch of cats, so I get up and head for the shower:

Er, this was the best I could come up with for a ‘heading to the shower’ photo. Look, it was early, and I’d only had one cup of coffee, OK?

Once in the shower, it occurs to me that this post would’ve been much better if I’d brought Terry breakfast in bed, served on an elaborately prepared tray, as opposed to a mug of tea in an oversized ‘Size Matters’ mug. You always thing of these things too late, don’t you?

Also in the shower, time magically speeds up, and by the time I get out, I realise I’m totally running late now, even although I thought I’d left myself plenty of time to get ready. HOW? HOW DOES THIS ALWAYS HAPPEN WHEN I GET INTO THE SHOWER? Because of this, I didn’t have time to take photos of the “getting ready” process (You’re not missing much, trust me…), but, just to give you an idea, here’s my dressing table before I started:

And here it is after:

Oh, and here’s Rubin, watching intently as I do my hair and makeup:

I sometimes think owning a dog is a bit like having a stalker: a cute, furry stalker, obviously, but still…

By the time I’m finished, I really am late, so I have to stop taking photos while I get dressed. You know, like a normal person does? I do, however, make the time for a quick n’ crappy mirror selfie:

This was supposed to be an outfit shot, but as you can see, I totally failed at that, and didn’t have time to re-take it, because OMG, you guys, we’re off an adventure!

Haha, no, I’m joking, we’re at a garden centre:

So, I’m going to just assume that at least 50% of you have stopped reading at this point: for those of you left, let me just explain that this was not my idea (I mean, if you’re a long-time reader, you already know how I feel about garden centres…): it was my mum’s. My mum, you see, is obsessed with Silverbirch Garden Centre, which is famous around these here parts for its massive selection of Christmas decorations and lights. Now, my mum has had this year’s Christmas theme nailed down since around April or thereabouts, but she wants to get ideas for NEXT year, and so, somewhat surprisingly, does Terry. I, as you know, am Not a Christmas Person (neither is Terry, actually, but for some reason he shares my mum’s enthusiasm for looking at Christmas decorations…), so I normally wouldn’t start thinking about it until Christmas Eve at the very earliest, but even I have to admit that it’s a pretty impressive display – or, as my mum puts it: “like a magical Christmas wonderland!”

Once we’ve made our purchases (Which will be showing up in a post near you, soon. Try not to let the anticipation keep you awake at night…), we head back up the Clyde Valley and stop for lunch at another garden centre (seriously, the place is full of them: some people spend the entire weekend just wandering from garden centre to garden centre: it’s, like, the national pastime or something…):

Mine is the baked potato (I have a slightly strange obsession with baked potatoes, which have been one of my favourite things to eat since I was a kid. I dunno, there’s just something comforting about them, somehow…), Terry’s is the brie and cranberry sandwich. Once we’ve put those away, we start to meander home, stopping on the way at a local antiques market for a quick look:

I mean, I say “antiques market”: it’s a bit of an eclectic mix of old and new, furniture and second-hand clothes, antique jewellery and brand new Muppet-print shoes…

Fairly standard stuff, right?

My parents come here fairly often and last year my mum picked up an amazing Burberry trench coat, in perfect condition, for something like £20, so ever since then it’s been my dream to find something similar. AND OMG! Is that…?

Yeah, it was. And it was £44. So, naturally it was down to my ankles, and totally the wrong size everywhere else, too, so after that I just didn’t want to go on living.*

There was an even bigger heartbreak waiting for me just around the corner, though:

It’s a second-hand teddy bear, and his tag reads, “Looking for love”. I LITERALLY DIED, PEOPLE. I mean, seriously, who could give away a TEDDY BEAR? And why wouldn’t Terry let me buy him? It was just like that time my parents took me to the cinema to see E.T. and when it got to the scene where you think E.T. is dead, I stood up and started wailing, “WHY DID YOU BRING ME HERE? WHY? WHY?” And I was 25 at the time, too.*

“You’ve brought me to a place where the Burberry coats don’t fit and there are teddy bears looking for love!” I said, aghast. “DO YOU PEOPLE EVEN KNOW ME? My heart is broken, and it will never mend… unless there happens to be a pair of Christian Louboutin ‘So Kate’ pumps, in a size 36.5, around the NEXT corner…”

There were no Christian Louboutin ‘So Kate’ pumps. I was, however, pretty taken with this huge doll house and old toy racing car:

I’m fascinated by stuff like this, and would SO love to know their stories: I find it quite sad in a way to think of these once-cherished toys ending up being sold to strangers who don’t know their history, but I like to imagine some long-ago little boy racing downstairs on Christmas morning to find this shiny red car sitting under the tree. Or the little girl who once played with this doll house, and knew every room. I wish I knew who they were and what happened to them, but alas, we will never know. Sad trombone!

Leaving the mysteries of the antiques market behind us, we headed back home, where I grabbed another coffee and quickly checked my email etc:

This was actually the first chance I’d had to get online all day, and as you can probably tell by the photo, it was totally dark outside by then (I HATE how early it gets dark at this time of year!), which made taking photos a challenge I knew I probably wouldn’t rise to. I was right, too, because once I’d finished my coffee, I headed downstairs to collapse on the sofa…

And that’s where I stayed for the rest of the evening.

With some of Tesco’s Sweet n’ Salty popcorn, which is honestly the best thing you will ever eat, and I would not steer you wrong on this, trust me.

And that was my day in pictures: or as much of my day as I could be bothered photographing, anyway. I may or may not do another one next month (the original idea had been for these to provide a little snapshot of my daily life, and how it changes on a month-to-month basis) but, well, we’ll see how that goes, shall we?

*Denotes sarcasm and/or blatant lies.