R&R

I am so lucky. Don't think I don't know and appreciate it! I never thought I'd not be working when we came over here but I am so happy it turned out this way. It has meant I've had to improve my cooking skills and I have had to do far more cleaning than I would like, but the benefits outweigh that! For instance, the weather here is more like british summer then spring already. It's been at least 18 degrees the last few days and it went up as high as 23 on Monday. Which is when I set myself up like so on the balcony...

I stayed in the sun for half an hour before sellotaping the umbrella to the railing. It's not exactly elegant but pale skin and freckles do not a sun worshiper make! My chair has two drink holder pockets - one in each arm - but clearly these are better used to hold knitting and my phone respectively, so I could bliss out while listening to an audiobook for a couple of hours. I'm knitting baby Jasmine a lacy summer cardigan.

Japanese women apparently prefer to stay as pale as possible and so avoid the sun and use spf 50+ sun lotion - the lowest I could find in the chemist was spf 35. According to my in-depth research (google) a lot of japanese sun lotions aimed at women have skin whitening agents in. I'm not sure how true that is, but I'll definitely be avoiding those. I'm Casper enough as it is! Which reminds me of this meme:

My sister and I cackled when we saw this because it is so true for both of us.