Knilly Frickers

The first time I typed the title of this blog I typed Summer 2017, I'm off to a great start! I love Autumn. Nature starts charging it's batteries and takes a bit of time out to rejuvinate before bursting to life again in Spring. That's a really healthy reminder sometimes, to take some time to recharge and not to burn out. I'm probably rubbish as favourites posts, I think I've made two lacklustre attempts but I thought I'd give it another go, maybe seasonally. Which would work well, as I'm also terrible at having an upload schedule. Here's some of my quirky faves this Autumn. I'm not sponsored by any companies, authors or locations I have mentioned below. Books    Yes, I am a 29 year old woman and yes there are two unicorn books in this section. I've said it before, I'll say it again, I dig unicorns. This Summer/Autumn some of my favourite reads have been Be More Unicorn: How to Find Your Inner Sparkle by Joanna Gray When The Curtain Falls by ...

Having recently been made redundant and finding myself back in the routine of job searching, I've experienced a dip in my internal and external sparkle. Be More Unicorn: How To Find Your Inner Sparkle by Joanna Gray was just what I needed to remind myself that the best way to find magic is to believe in myself and create it. When my mother handed me the book, she knew it didn't need a hard sell. I dig unicorns. Maybe it's because I'm Scottish and the unicorn is our national animal? Some parts of the book were a useful reminder embrace opportunities to be magical, fabulous and playful but other parts taught me the importance of digging a bit deeper into who I am both on the inside and the outside to become more graceful, enigmatic, fierce and fulfilled. I'm a firm believer in following the advice of my Unicorn Decision Making Pen which quite often encourages me to Chase a Rainbow but often I fail to spot the rainbow or even look for it because I think I know better. ...

Hello! I've been pretty silent on my blog for a while. My batteries have been charging. I forget sometimes when I'm charging my devices throughout the day that my brain is the most frequently used device I own and needs the same care an attention to work at full capacity. I'm keen to get a bit fitter than I currently am, not in an I must be skinny, I will now document my trip to the gym every day, but I do spent alot of my day sitting and I'd like to be a bit more active, and climb a few flights of stairs or a hill without needing a good 5-10 minutes to recover. I'm going to combine my shoe diary with my attempts to get out and do some exploring on foot.    According to the internet - and who am I to argue with the internet? - there are 2000 steps in a mile, I initially set my target at 3000 but found that I was exceeding it so I moved it to 4500.  A few days ago I managed over 18,000 but I did an uncharacterisitic amount of walking that day so I won't get too c...

I believe Lorelai Gilmore - my resident go to guru for anything in life really - said it best when she said:  ‘My Brain is a wild jungle full of scary gibberish’   I can relate! I often end up with a foggy burned out brain because I’m trying to make it do or remember too much at once. Here are a few things I’ve been doing recently to ‘Mentally Declutter’ that I’ve found really helpful.  Colour Coordinated Apps I changed my phone background from a brightly coloured picture of Beaker from The Muppets (sorry Beaker, I love you) to a photo of a rainbow above a loch that I took on a recent trip. It’s much calmer and makes for a great backdrop. I’ve colour coordinated all of the apps on the phone so that all the same or similar colours are grouped together and everything sits on two screens rather than four or five. Colours that don’t match anything else are grouped together in folders. It sounds silly but it makes looking at my phone less distracting and I’m less likely to get...

*This is not a sponsored post, I just really enjoyed the tea and wanted to write about it* I've always been a bit picky when it comes to hot drinks although I've recently discovered that I'm quite into quirky tea! I was doing a bit of shopping on my way to meet a friend on a freezing cold day - to give her a two month late birthday present, I digress - and wandered into T2 .  I'd been in before about year or so before, bought some fruity tea that didn't really float my boat and never really ventured back in, but on this freezing cold day I wandered in and the friendly staff member encouraged me to have a small cuppa while I browsed - I poured myself some Green Rose and began to look around, I knew there were a lot of flavours but I'd never realised just how many! I spotted the explorer flasks and after a chat with another friendly member of staff I decided to go for one - I've since bought a teamaker too and both are amazing. I bought a few flavours to go wi...

Shortly before Christmas, James started asking me about books  'We've never really had the book chat, have we?' 'No, I guess we haven't' I mean we've had the Harry Potter chat - FYI, I'm a Ravenclaw,  Neville Longbottom is my hero and Bellatrix Lestrange is my mortal enemy. What he was referring to is that while we each know the other has a love of reading, we've never really delved into a chat about authors and genres, although in hindsight this seems remiss of me. I bore other people, sometimes actual strangers, with my book chat daily.  He's lost me in bookstores for a good ten minutes because something has caught my eye and I've swooped towards it for a closer inspection.  When he picked 'You Do You' as one of my gifts, he did so partly because it's something I say quite often, but also because Sarah Knight featured pretty high on my list of favourite authors. For someone who called their blog The Quirky Queen, has blue ombre ...

I've been working from home over the last few days - something I'm very fortunate to be able to do, I know that lots of people have been stranded on motorways, in work, in airports etc.  Alongside working from home, all of the things I do outside of work were cancelled and I’ve been spending a lot of time indoors. Although I can be a bit of a homebody, I do actually thrive on getting out and about. I'm not really complaining, I'm very lucky to have had the warmth and comfort of my home to work in, a luxury that not everyone has had access to.  My mind does wander a little more at home though and I thought it would be funny to record and share my thought process across the last few days.  Wednesday 7.16am Confirmation received from work that the snow is too cray-cray to be venturing out in the direction of the office.   7.17am I go back to bed and enjoy the lie in afforded to me by a lack of need to travel or put on clean underwear.  8.30am  I’ve been awake ...