Reading Archives

Posted on April 24, 2017 by Vicki — 6 Comments

The Week in Soap: 23rd April ’17 – A rainbow, a birthday and a rather good read

After a lovely couple of weeks off for Easter, the kids went back to school today and we’re almost back to normal. I say almost as today was the little one’s fourth birthday, so nothing normal about that :-D. We threw a party for her and her friends yesterday (Sunday) so today was a little more low key. I picked her up after her two hours at school this morning (she won’t be full-time until next September and neither of us can wait haha!) and went into town for some mum/daughter time and a BIG bowl of ice-cream. Do you think she enjoyed it?

I usually get to go to work for an hour or two at four o’ clock when my husband finishes work, but today my mum came over with a birthday gift so we had some birthday cake and played with kinetic sand (that stuff is AMAZING – I wonder if the recipes on Pinterest are any good?). We’ve had lots of fun but tomorrow is definitely ‘back to normal’ day and I’m looking forward to getting back into the swing of work again.

I only managed one evening of soapmaking this last week – a double batch of Tutti Frutti. It was these batches that I photographed to use in my rainbow drop swirl tutorial:

Tutti Frutti ready to set up — Tutti Frutti in the Mould

Tutti Frutti mid-cut:

In other news, I’ve finally found a novel to end my reading drought and I think I’ll actually be able to say I’ve read a whole book by the end of the month. Now this is a big, huge, MASSIVE deal for me given that I’ve been whingeing on to anyone who’ll listen about how much I miss reading, but what’s at the back of my mind? Oh, only the fact that I didn’t bother with that perennial ‘read a book’ goal this month – gah!! Anyway, I’m a bit late to the The Girl on the Train party, but I picked up a copy for pennies at a table-top sale recently and I’m LOVING it. It’s an easy read, but it has me hooked, and I find myself glancing over at it at various times of the day, wondering if I could get away with hiding in the corner for half an hour for another fix…

Thanks for reading, back soon!

Posted on January 31, 2017 by Vicki — 1 Comment

January 2017 – Goals Roundup

So that was January! Four and a half weeks of my least favourite time of year, but you know what? It’s been pretty productive. Back on the 3rd January I posted my goals for the month, and I’m really happy with what’s been achieved since then.

I completed my tax return. Deadline was today, 31st January, but I made sure it was one of the first things I ticked off my list. Missing that deadline was not an option!

I finally got round to making some Castile soap – something that had been on my list of things to do for aaaages. I’ll be posting an update on the cure is progressing towards the end of next month:

I’ve done a fair bit of research for my facial bar. I’m planning on making two – a charcoal bar for younger / combination skin, and a bar aimed at older skin. I have a good idea of the recipes now, and hope to make some trial bars next month.

Finally I hoped to post on this blog at least 8 times. Well, this post is the eighth of the month, so a big fat tick for that one too…

I was gentle with myself as far as the personal goals went – I wanted to run 30km, and read a book, any book, just to try to get back into the habit of reading again. Well, I smashed the running – I’ve run 65.5km (!!) during January, and it would have been more had I not picked up a bug which morphed into a cold towards the end of the month which meant I only really ran for the first three weeks or so. I’ve also started kickboxing once a week, which is hard work but amazing fun.

The reading went pretty well too. I finished the book that I’d been crawling through for the last three months of 2016 – Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages by Gaston Dorren It’s an extraordinarily interesting book (if you’re as fascinated by languages as I am) and a very easy read. Each stand alone chapter is only a few pages long but packed with facts that made me ooohh and aaahhh with delight as I learned about the vast similarities and differences that exist within the languages of Europe. I also got halfway through a novel – The Magicians (Book 1) by Lev Grossman. I enjoyed it enough at the beggining, but I had a nagging feeling that it was aimed at a younger readership – maybe a YA novel? Turns out it’s not, but I can’t get excited about the characters, and have decided life’s too short, and reading time too precious, to continue with something that I’m not ABSOLUTELY loving. I only found out today that it’s been made into a TV series in the US. Have you seen it? Is it any good? Anyway, I now need to find a better book to read for February, ‘cos it’s going on that goals list again 🙂

So there we go – January goals smashed… I was going to include my February goals in this post but it’s got a bit longer than planned, so I’ll leave them for tomorrow – which gives me a little longer to think about them too 😉

Don’t forget to comment below if there’s a particular novel that you would absolutely, definitely recommend I read – I’m open to all and any suggestions and genres (except horror – I don’t do horror)

Thank you if you’ve read this far – the fact that someone might actually read what I write is definitely an incentive to stick to my plans.

Posted on October 27, 2016 by Vicki — Leave a comment

Free time? What’s that?

Last month I posted this photo on my Instagram page:

Lovely Language Literature :) — Lovely Language Literature 🙂

It’s a selection of books I’d bought with some Amazon vouchers I’d received for my birthday back in July. At various points in the subsequent comments I mentioned that my degree is in Linguistics, and as well as being fluent in a second language (Welsh), I have also studied French, German, Spanish and Russian. Ever since my teenage years I’ve had a passion for anything to do with language in general, and to this day I have a special interest in the history of language and how different language interrelate.

I was fascinated by the comments this post elicited from other soapmakers – so many are bi- or even multi-lingual, and/or have an interest in history, as well as a huge variety of other interests and hobbies. Soap, soapmaking and soapy social media have a tendency to dominate my life and I forget to take a break and do something completely different. Truth be told I struggle to find the time to stop and do something different. Having a business that is also one’s hobby is not the best combination for a good work/life balance it would appear. In the last six weeks I’ve managed to read just the first 35 pages of one of those books, despite finding it deeply absorbing (I usually manage 1.5 – 2 pages in bed before nodding off, no matter how hard I fight it).

So, go on, tell me what you do in your free time. What are your interests, your passions, and how do you find the time to indulge them?

Posted on January 10, 2016 by Vicki — 4 Comments

2016 Personal Goals

I don’t do resolutions. Haven’t done for years. I can’t be bothered with airy fairy statements like ‘I resolve to get fit’ or ‘I resolve to learn a new language’ blah blah blah, which never seem to come to anything (for me, anyway)

I do, however, like the idea of having specific, measurable goals, and while I’ll cover my Business goals for 2016 in another post very soon, I wanted to share with you my two personal goals for this year. (Not least because I’m hoping that having to update here will make me more accountable!)

My first goal is to run 1,000km during 2016. Before having children I used to be a regular runner, but that was over six years ago, and I’ve been feeling recently that I want to regain my previous fitness levels. On paper, 1,000km seems a lot (especially as I ran a total of 93.5km last year!) but I really think it’s doable – it equates to 19.2km a week, or 83.3km a month. This week I’ve run 14.5km over four days (rest days on Wed & today – Sat) and I’m planning on going again tomorrow, so I’m on track:

and the distance I run per week should increase as I get fitter. That’s the plan anyway!

My second goal is far more sedentary – I plan to read 12 novels. Compared to how much I used to read, it seems a paltry number, nevertheless it will probably be a harder goal to achieve than my running one (I had the same goal last year and I read 4 (4!!) novels all year) But my evenings are almost always spent working – be it soapmaking, wrapping/labelling soap, paperwork, marketing etc etc etc. Add to that two young children, exercise time (see above!) and a part-time day job (with related compulsory coursework/study) and time for reading suddenly becomes rather hard to find. I hope to squeeze in half an hour reading at bedtime before my eyelids start to droop!

Number 1, and currently on my bedside table is Life after Life by Kate Atkinson:

Anyway, that’s it for now. Once again it’s approaching midnight and I’m nowhere near bed. Oh for more hours in the day lol!

Wish me luck, and let me know what your goals and/or resolutions are for 2016 🙂