Yesterday was quite a busy Saturday, to say the least! We woke up at about seven, then I worked on research for my Masters until about 12.30. It was interesting actually; I’m looking at how poetry and Maths could be combined within the English classroom, and I stumbled across a few amazing blogs (what else?) that provided a huge resource of related links and articles. Anyway, you don’t want to hear about that…

After I’d finished working, we headed off to Mossley to visit the Emmaus charity warehouse. On the way, we stopped off in Staly Vegas to visit a couple of charity shops which is where we found these:

There are six of them, but my picture of all six is terrible! After the not-quite-delights of Staly Vegas, we headed up to Mossley.

I like Mossley. It has a kind of ‘in the hills’, ruralish, pleasant feel about it, similar to Glossop. The Emmaus charity shop there is usually good. Downstairs, it has lots of furniture from all eras. We’re after some kind of shelving for the hundreds of pots that our tiny house now holds. We were quite keen on a 1950s unit, but on discovering that we couldn’t fit it into the car, we had to leave it behind.

Ironically, considering where we later went, we ended up buying three cheap Ikea shelving units from there for thirty quid. These have now been commandeered to house the West German Pottery in both bedrooms:

We were intending to do a charity shop hunt around Ashton as well, but by the time we’d looked around the Emmaus properly, and discovered that the ’50s unit wouldn’t fit into the car, we didn’t really have time.

I also wanted some plants and other bits and bobs for school, so we headed over to Ikea in Ashton. Ikea is Ikea. Boring, big and full of bothersome people. It is almost impossible to leave that place without a candle of some kind: but I managed it yesterday. I even had one in my hand yet I made a conscious effort to put it back down…

Plants bought:

I’ve just bobbed them into those two WGP planters for now. They WILL be making it into school, no matter how good they look in our kitchen. Aidan says I can take some German planters to have them in, but not those two as they’re ‘too nice’. To be fair, I don’t necessarily trust the kids not to mess with them, especially the one that looks like fingers! The teeny-tiny hyacinths were a Christmas present. Unfortunately, they seem to have forgotten to grow before flowering.

Almost forgot: I bought a couple of books as well.

This picture probably shows off my eclectic tastes like no other! I love anything to do with fashion from decades past; I also have started reading Science Fiction – Philip K. Dick in particular. An odd mixture, but it keeps me happy.

Needless to say, after all of this trekking around yesterday, we needed to relax and so treated ourselves to an earlyish tea at Lily’s Vegetarian Indian Restaurant. It’s amazing! There’s a giant Asian supermarket next door, which is run by the same people. So you can eat the gorgeous food at Lily’s then go next door and by the ingredients to make it yourself. The link above is to the shop’s website; it has recipes for food in the restaurant bit so I think I’ll be making some of that this week.

A busy Saturday and a busy Sunday ahead too. Work, running, a return trip to Emmaus as I’ve discovered they have another shop in the area which is open today. Aidan’s got the projector from work at home this weekend, so we’ll be watching a film or two this evening.

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