#3goodthings 🧅Homemade cheese & onion rolls were really tasty. 🧾VAT return sorted out and submitted. 🚲Took my partner's bike to the bike workshop and they were able to repair it in 5 minutes.

#3goodthings 🕊️It's really peaceful in my garden on a weekday. None of the neighbours seem to be doing building work at the moment. 🧾A panic where I thought I'd lost a load of bank statements was completely baseless and I had just forgotten how months worked (I'm not going to dwell on that […]

I picked up _The Trouble with Goats and Sheep_ by Joanna Cannon as I'd read one of the author's books a couple of years back and really enjoyed it. This was a delightful book too. Set in a suburban cul-de-sac during the 1976 heatwave. It starts with the […] [Original post on social.lol]

#3goodthings ⏳Created some time by getting up and doing stuff earlier whilst it was cooler. 🌅 Really nice watching the sun go down with a glass of wine and a book. Feel like I'm on holiday but I'm in my back garden. 🤔Reminiscing about holidays as a result.

I've been reading _What We Cannot Know_ by Marcus du Sautoy for several months, after several years of it loitering in my bedside table stack of books. My #SummerReadingChallenge finally persuaded me to finish it. It's an exploration of the edges of scientific […] [Original post on social.lol]

#3goodthings 🧦 Sorted out my underwear drawer and threw out all the threadbare items. 🏖️Bought a new garden parasol, it's not quite what I wanted but what I mostly want at the moment is extra shade! 🪏 I also now own a hoe with which to battle the weeds.

#3goodthings 🧼Cleaned my laptop screen. 🛒Got the supermarket shopping done. 💻Opened up a project I'd abandoned and had some ideas for what to do with it next.

#3GoodThings @3goodthings#3goodthings 🧵 Arranged a day trip to sewing show with my mum. 👩🏻‍💻Did a software upgrade that's been waiting months for me to get to it and all was ok. 🍓 Harvested (and ate) 7 strawberries from my hanging basket.

Last summer I had a real reading slump and barely read anything. I’ve already struggled to read through June. So I obviously need a sensible grown up approach to entice myself to read more this summer. Now I think I need to go and acquire some stickers too! […] [Original post on social.lol]

#3goodthings 📆 I started the day thinking it was Thursday so Friday evening has been an unexpected surprise. (I think I thought yesterday was Wednesday. I remember it being Tuesday for definite before that. I've no idea what happened to actual Wednesday.) 💾Caching. 🥃White chocolate liqueur […]

#3goodthings ⚡️Lots of negatively priced electricity (because it's windy). 🧺About a squillion loads of laundry done with the aid of that electricity. ⛲️ Azul: Queen's Garden appeared on BoardGameArena so that's my new distracting obsession.

I imported 650 posts from instagram onto my own website, in preparation for when I eventually flip out with instagram (I last posted 18 months ago but still find myself scrolling to my own bewilderment.) My import method involved hacking away at the export archive provided by instagram with my […]

Here’s my #StoryGraph #reading stats for June. Beginning of the month was very slow for reading as I was travelling and peopling and generally being worn out. Near the end of the month I suddenly found my brain didn’t want to do anything but read and knocked off two books in four days.

I got 26 #BoardGames in during June, weirdly exactly the same number as in May. Quite happy with that! Continuing to enjoy Yonder & Skara Brae and introduce them to new players. I had a chance to play Speakeasy too and really liked how thematic it felt. Looking […] [Original post on social.lol]

#3goodthings 💡Disconnected the outside light that's been stuck on for months and had started buzzing. 📺 Got the TV aerial taken down and removed by a lad we spotted doing a similar job for a neighbour. 🌱 Another wheelie bin worth of weeds removed from the garden. The bushes trying to encroach […]

_A Family Romance_ by Anita Brookner was a nice cool book to read in a heatwave. For the most part I enjoyed the young narrator telling the life of her aunt Dolly. The book was published elsewhere under the title 'Dolly' but personally I thought the juxtaposition […] [Original post on social.lol]

#3goodthings 🧽Scrubbed all the grouting in the shower clean. 🚫I only soft-deleted the stuff I thought was wrong so I was able to restore it easily when I realised it wasn't. 👩🏻‍💻Figured out how to upgrade some software that's been spewing error messages each time I try.

Twenty years ago I read one of Kate Grenville's books and thought it was great and I should read some more soon. I get there eventually! _Restless Dolly Maunder_ tells the story of Dolly, born on an Australian sheep farm in 1881 and how she grows up and tries to […] [Original post on social.lol]

#3goodthings 📖 My reading mojo has definitely returned in the last few days. ⛅️The weather is definitely feeling much more normal (for the north of England) today. 🛏️ Clean sheets on the bed for a (hopefully) cooler sleep tonight.

I picked up _Death Goes On Skis_ by Nancy Spain because the green Virago Classics spine stood out among all the copy cat crime novel covers. Unfortunately the 1940s comic novel within the covers didn't really gel with me. I think the author is probably way. more […] [Original post on social.lol]

#3goodthings 🌅 Getting to watch the sunrise was a bonus that came along with the 4am airport drop off 🗺️ The sat nav helping out when you realise it knows about the nighttime road closures that you don't. 📦 The cat is enjoying the delivery box house in the garden.

#3goodthings 🩳The offspring, who is off to even hotter climes, managed to find some shorts they liked enough to buy them. 👩🏻‍💻Enjoying remembering/refiguring-out how "sed" works. 😥 It's definitely cooler this evening.

#3goodthings 📖 The mini library they've opened inside the leisure centre is great. It's easier to pick something to read when I only have a small choice. 🛒 Doing the shopping meant we got to hang out in the supermarket aircon for a bit. 🙂‍↕️Giving myself permission to just be completely […]

#3goodthings 🐦Sitting outside at 5am listening to the birdsong. Also it's nice and cool at that time. 🍪 The ginger biscuit recipe came out really chewy this time but that's fine, so long as there are biscuits it'll always be fine! 🧊 Discovered that the freezer freezes ice cubes really quite […]

#3goodthings 🏊🏻‍♀️The swimming pool felt nice and cool this morning. 😴Napping through the afternoon heat. 🎭Investigating Shakespeare with the offspring this evening.

#3goodthings 🪑Found a shady spot to sit and work in front of my house. 🥯 We found two bagels in the back of the cupboard so there were enough components for a meal without going to the supermarket. 🦋 Butterflies fluttering in the overgrown verges.

#3goodthings 🌺Coming across a bright and beautiful field of poppies by the cycle path. ☕️Remembered to use up one of my free reward point coffees before I paid for it. 🍞 Cleaned a small mountain of crumbs out of the toaster.

#3goodthings 🍱 Supermarket sushi I grabbed because the meal I wanted wasn't available was much better than I expected. ☀️Getting home in daylight (just about) at 22:30. 🌇Gorgeous sunset with silhouettes of wind turbines, pylons and other industrial infrastructure. Always feels very video gamey.

#3goodthings 🍛 The offspring made me an egg fried rice veggie stir fry for lunch. 👖 Lots of laundry washed and dried. 🌄Figured out a way to get my instagram posts imported on to my website. Some hassle but it'll be worth it to have my archive where I own it.

#3goodthings 🕸️Some website changes turned out to be much less of a headache than I expected. 🍦I know I picked ice cream as a good thing yesterday but today I bought a cornet and a lady told me how nice it looked and that was lovely. 💼 Managed to leave my bag, with my laptop, by the cycling […]

#3goodthings 🌱 Pulled a wheelie bin worth of weeds out of the garden. 🍦There was medicinal ice cream to counteract the hay fever attack brought on by the weeds. 🗓️Realised that Vivaldi has a built in feed reader so I loaded up my last OPML archive and lots of 20+ year old RSS posts arrived […]

All I wanted to do was put my review of _Love and Friendship_ by Alison Lurie up and I ended up in website software upgrade hell, which is hopefully obscured enough now that it's not obvious, though I doubt everything works. Anyway, this is Lurie's first adult […] [Original post on social.lol]

Here's my belated #reading roundup for May. I was off travelling and visiting family last week and then my internet went down when I got home. I've just about caught up on my sleep and have enough energy to do non-essential stuff now! I kept my reading streak […] [Original post on social.lol]

Was the entire #wwdc keynote a dream sequence hallucinated by the marketing department under the influence in the camper van?

#3goodthings 🚲 Forgot where I was heading on my bike and went in the wrong direction, but that just gave me more fun riding to do. 📖 Randomly selected library book seems pretty good. 🌱 I thought I'd killed my seedlings but they have bounced right back after a drink.

#3goodthings 👩🏻‍💻Got lots of work done at the library despite the presence of multiple annoying groups of loud people. 🕊️Appreciated the peace and quiet at home after that. 🍪Made ginger and oat biscuits. They turned out well; the recipe is a keeper.

I spotted _Kin_ by Tayari Jones as a new release at a newly opened bookshop and couldn't resist it as I'd really enjoyed a couple of her previous books. The setting is smalltown Louisiana in the 1950s, Vernice and Annie have grown up together and the story starts […] [Original post on social.lol]

#3goodthings ☕️Nice chat while out for coffee. 🧼Cleaned the kitchen floor, or at least the filthiest corner of it. 🎹 Learning more about how music works.

#3goodthings 🥚 The fridge leftovers concoction of fried veg, eggs and cheese wasn't quite an omelette or a frittata but it was nice. 🃏Played a couple of fun rounds of Eternal Decks with a group who don't usually do cooperative games. 🥛 Encountered an actual milk float out delivering on my way […]

#3goodthings 🏊🏻‍♀️ Now the refurbished leisure centre has reopened I've bought a year of membership and can go swimming (more or less) whenever I like again. 🥥 Bought myself some new coconut body moisturiser. 🚤 Selling our boat (we decided we don't use it enough to justify having it) is […]

#3goodthings ✍️ Writing the not good things down helps to process the thoughts and emotions surrounding them. 🌭Veggie sausages are great. 🚲 My bike keeps soldiering on and keeping me sane even though it really needs some TLC (and oil).

My #BoardGames plays for April were pretty varied. ISS Vanguard comes in at the top. I played the tutorial by myself when my partner bought it in 2022, then we played the tutorial together again in 2024. We finally jumped into the campaign in 2026, and arsed up a […] [Original post on social.lol]

Last summer I got into a reading slump & I was determined not to do the same this summer. But here we are, it’s only April and my reading is already drifting away from me. Only two books read, both of which were decent but I haven’t written reviews for either yet […] [Original post on social.lol]

I have barely done any knitting this week but I just realised there was another project I could share for #WIPWednesday instead. This is a book nook kit I was given for my birthday last week that I’ve just started making. It’s mostly tiny bits of laser cut wood […] [Original post on social.lol]

I never read Nancy Drew books as a child. They come up often when adult readers of mysteries get together though and when I saw the first few from 1930 were out of copyright and available for free on the internet I jumped on a pdf scan of an original copy to read […] [Original post on social.lol]

_You Are Here_ by David Nicholls would be dismissed as chick-lit if the author were female, but like a lot of chick-lit it's well written and full of interesting characters. Marnie and Michael both get invited to a walk along the coast to coast route across the […] [Original post on social.lol]

#3goodthings 🌼Bright yellow daffodils in the rain. 📃I queried something that made no sense to me and got emailed some instructions that showed I was looking in completely the wrong place. Problem sorted. 🧄There was just enough garlic left to make focaccia.

_A City on Mars_ by Kelly & Zach Weinersmith has the subtitle “Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?” and - spoilers - the answers seem to be maybe, a smaller maybe, and a big fat nope. Ultimately I came out of the […] [Original post on social.lol]

#3goodthings 🌤️It was a mild and pleasant day and we sat outside the cafe to eat lunch. 🆘 We were able to be of help when someone dining near us had a medical emergency. (All was ok in the end!) 🥾 I found some new shoes to buy.

#3goodthings 📮Putting a letter in the post box, a strangely nostalgic feeling. There will (probably) be a last time I do this and I guess I won't remember it, just like I have no idea when I last used a phone box, so I'm remembering this time. 📧 Sending an email. So easy and yet I've been […]