bluecat says:

Hallo Revishfolk.
I'm a white, middle-aged, unmarried but not single, longhaired female pedestrian living in a small medieval city in East Anglia, which is the bulgy bit more or less above London if you look at a map of England. I'm a wannabe smallholder: we have a back garden the size of a tablecloth and lots of pots, but dreams of herding bees, growing chickens, up at dawn to milk the pigs, etc. I heard about Revish through Dan and Rosemary's terrific smallholder site. I read a lot, and re-read favourite books a lot too: kids' books as well as adults'. I'm a computing semi-literate (if I can't break it it's pretty good), and have lived most of the last 20 years overseas, in Italy, Thailand, Laos, France and the United Arab Emirates, with short bouts in Spain, China, Romania and Yemen. I'm a freelance teacher of English as a foreign language, a teacher trainer, and, oddly, also a trainer for the England and Wales Police Forces, as well as other stuff.
Ermm, that's about it. Oh, I have a new fab hobby, which is knitting lace, out of a needlecraft book from the 1920's that my beloved gave me. This may prevent me from reading and posting as much as I would otherwise... at least til I finish the piece I'm doing.

#1 Posted 1 years ago

danchamp says:

Hi bluecat. :-)

Welcome aboard, it doesn't look like you've broken Revish yet, so I'll take that as a good sign. If you can find the time to pop by from time-to-time to post a message, and read and comment on a review or two, that will be great.

You'll also need to give me some pig milking tips - I just can't seem to get the hang of it. :-)

#2 Posted 1 years ago

cedarwaxwing says:

Hi Bluecat -

You'll have to post a picture of your finished product somewhere on the web so we can see how it turned out.

You have lived in a lot of places! How exciting.

Do you find that when you re-read a favorite children's book as an adult it changes the way you feel about it? That has happened to me so often I'm now reluctant to re-read favorites from my childhood.

#3 Posted 1 years ago

bluecat says:

Hi Dan, the problem is getting the pigs over the milk bottle!

Hallo Cedarwaxwing (what a nice name! Is that an actual bird or beastie?) I just started the lace yesterday so only have a couple of inches to show so far, though it does grow a lot faster than scarf-knitting.

Interesting question. I haven't, so far, re-read an old favourite from childhood and found I disliked it - at least, not yet. Perhaps it's because I often re-read my favourite books when I was a child too.

But my appreciation alters. For instance, I've recently been buying the books in the Laura Ingalls Wilder "Little House on the Prairie" series whenever I find them in charity shops, and reading them with a much greater interest in the smallholder and make-do-and-mend side of things.

First time around, as a kid in the London suburbs, I found them exciting (wolves howling on the prairie, and your Dad building the house from scratch out of logs, etc) and very alien (what is this Fourth of July? and what's so special about lemonade?)

Now I'm much more impressed by all the work involved in the pioneer life, and how alien they were to their environment, with their tea-drinking and their little china figurine carried all the way from the East coast as a sign of respectability. I find them subtler books than I would have supposed.

Actually, shall I start a thread on re-reading kids' books? (perhaps not tonight: I've yet to sort out my powerpoint for tomorrow).

Oh, forgot to mention, I'm Sarah.

#4 Posted 1 years ago

cedarwaxwing says:

Great idea about a group on re-reading kids' books, I will definitely participate.

My husband re-reads the Laura Ingalls Wilder books often - he grew up on a farm near Elgin, Illinois (in fact, as a boy,Charles Ingalls lived close to where my husband would grow up.) I didn't read them until I was in my early twenties, so while I enjoyed them, they may not have meant so much to me.

#5 Posted 1 years ago