A Slow Week in my Scottish Life 🌱spring wardrobe, vegan grocery haul, library visits & nature walks

Happy Monday loves. I'm currently sat in a forestry car park and I've just taken Skye on her longer walk of the day. I'm at Davy Atwood's which is just outside of Inverness. It's actually just off the A9 so it's quite a good pit stop if you are traveling north and conveniently it has a cafe right next to it and it's not something somewhere I've spent a huge amount of time but it's actually not far now from where we're parked up in our tiny home so it's become a little bit of a regular setup here and I find if I give Skye a good walk around here it's about an hour to do like the main loop and then she can have a nice snooze in the van whilst I have a coffee and get some work done. So that's what I was doing this morning, I was just finishing up a Substack post. I like to do my Substack on Mondays and get it like done and scheduled for the following week if possible and I thought I would just film bits and bobs from my week because I feel like I've not done that for a little while and we could just have a bit of a chatty catch up and I can show you the kind of routines because we've recently moved our tiny home, we were down about an hour south in the Cairngorms National Park and we're now kind of on the outskirts of Inverness so my routines have shifted around a little bit. I thought I would share that with you guys but still going to be a kind of cozy kind of vlog that you didn't come to expect from me all about trying to live like a slower pace of life. You know plenty of nature walks, maybe some book chat, maybe some cooking, we will see. But today I want to have various things you might be able to see that I need to drop off at charity. I did a little bit to clutter it, well I've been regularly just culling bits and pieces and I've done a little bit of a cull my books recently because I'm in the changing between seasons and I tend to do a cull, I don't know, four times a year at the end of every season because I do tend to read seasonally. So I've gone through all the books I read this winter and picked out any I want to keep and the rest which is probably about 90% if not more of them I am donating to charity. Most of them I got from charity in the first place, that's my preferred way of reading. So I'm going to drop those off and I might nip into the Highland Whole Foods which is near the charity shop because I have no bread. I tried to cut a piece of sourdough earlier and it was a real arm workout, it was that stale. So I think at least from tomorrow I'm going to need some bread and I'm hoping that they might have some sourdough from a local bakery because it is stunning if they do. It's expensive but it's worth it but if not I haven't been in there for a little while so I'm sure I can find a couple of things that interest me. Get my spits together and we're gonna head there now. So they had sourdough which I was very pleased with and I'm not sure whether I'm gonna put half in the freezer because my partner's not here for most of this week and it's just me so that's quite a lot to get through so probably will end up freezing some of it but I get this from, it's just called The Bakery in Inverness and I got this from Highland Whole Foods because they deliver, they stock their loaves on like a Monday and a Wednesday and a Friday I think. It's very nice and then I'm just gonna make myself a cup of tea and a wee snack it's about three which is about the time I like to have a bit of a pick-me-up and at the moment I'm enjoying the Pucker vanilla chai which I think is kind of like one of those teas that I can drink all year round. I have different teas for like different seasons. At the moment I'm kind of enjoying this for the spring but I might want to mix it up and maybe have a berry type one for like the summer time but I'm enjoying that at the moment and in terms of a snack, really simple. I had Weetabix for the longest time but I've kind of sickened myself a little bit so I've mixed it up and got myself some just Tesco brown flakes with oat milk and then I like the Oatly Greek style yoghurt. They seem to be doing bigger packs at the moment which I'm appreciating and then I just top it with some blueberries and yeah it's really simple but it's a nice little mid-afternoon snack. I've just popped into the library because a book I ordered had come in which is always a good day and I thought I'd share it with you. It's this one, A Lady's Guide to Fortune Hunting. I seem to be reading very specific things in the spring at the moment. I'm reading like a lot more Regency stuff, a lot more classics, historical kind of things and I thought this kind of fit. I think it's meant to be quite a funny take, I think it's a romance because essentially it's about the protagonist trying to marry a rich man because I think she's trying to save her family that are facing homelessness and they have a short period of time, I think 12 weeks for her to do this but there is this lord that is savvy to what she's doing and tries to stop her, which I'm guessing will end up being a romance. But I've seen, I've heard good things about this one, I thought it'd be another fun one to have on my spring reading list. If you do want more bookish stuff from me then I do share quite a lot of that stuff over on my sub stack and I have recently launched a book club over there. I had a paid membership over there for a couple of years but I've pivoted it to being more book focused now so as well as those members getting extra content so they get bookish themed videos every month and they get monthly roundups for my reading and all my seasonal reading lists, things like that. We are also reading a book together per season and we're reading Anna Green Gables for the spring which I'm thrilled about because that is one of my all-time favourite books. It's a beautiful children's classic and perfectly epitomises those spring feels which is lovely. And I have a dedicated chat for that book club over on sub stack which is just for my members and it's been really nice to hear from them there, be able to contact you guys directly and also for you guys to be able to speak to each other and you know share photos of like bookish days out and bookshelves and thoughts and things like that. It's really nice to have that kind of real-time connection because I don't really do short form content anywhere so a lot of the time there's quite a big delay between what's actually up in my life and what I'm sharing online so it's quite nice to have that and obviously being like a closed chat means you've got a little bit more privacy and security in what you're sharing and get a bit of a closer connection which has been lovely. And we are looking to schedule a our first virtual meetup in May so I'll link my sub stack down below in case you want to be part of that community at all or just you can just sign up to my newsletter and get a free post every Monday and often those are bookish themed anyway but they're more generally about my slow life as a whole. Yeah nice morning at the library and now I'm gonna go back and make myself some lunch. So I just picked up a very exciting parcel I wanted to share with you guys. I have been looking to refresh a little bit my spring and summer wardrobe and one thing that I've been kind of meaning to do for a while is figuring out different like trousers and bottoms options because I often just wear cotton leggings which are fine but I'm getting a little bit bored of them and they're also still not always the most practical item for my lifestyle so I kind of wanted something that was both practical and fun and yeah essentially led me to shopping a passenger which is one of my favourite outdoor brands and I have a pair of dungarees from them that I've had for two or three years now and I absolutely love them they're super comfortable but I can also wear them out on dog walks and things like that. So I thought we would open this together okay so these are their daydream trousers and I got them in spruce yellow the only reason I got them in yellow is because they were on at half price in sale and I figured I might as well. I am a little bit worried they're going to be a bit too yellow I'm sure I'll have a look although as you can see I do like that colour. Oh no they're nice oh that's a really nice colour it actually looks quite similar to the I'm having a real yellow moment I mean look it's got a yellow jumper I've decided I think last year I got really into orange this year I'm apparently getting into yellow but no they look good oh they're so cute I'll try them on and show you okay these are ridiculously comfortable I feel like I'm wearing pyjamas and I actually think the colour's quite cute I mean it's a fair summary obviously we have pockets and then more pockets and then it's like cuffed at the bottom which is really comfy and then this waistband is super super comfy ignore the fact that my I'm gonna have to get some nude pants I've been meaning to get them for a while and this is just another incentive to do that because they are a little bit see-through that's probably the only thing I'd say about them maybe if you've got a different colour that would be less of an issue but they're so soft I think they're all made from cotton they feel like cotton yeah I like this isn't like a pair of semi things I could definitely do a dog walk in these which is always a criteria the only other thing about them is they do look a little bit like wrinkled and I'm not someone that irons I don't even own an iron um so I'll have to test that but to be honest I think that kind of goes with the vibe also this is Skye's favourite favourite sleep spot now right by the window or the door even and the sun's shining in like it darling yeah do you like it I like the sunshine want to go out again soon to have a little playtime I think so I've just snipped into Tesco and thought I'd give you a wee haul of like roughly a week shop quite small wee shop to be honest so this is kind of just like a rundown of my weekly staples start back here I got some Oatly I like to get a mix of the barista and the whole barista is my favourite but this was on deal so I got a mix of that as well and then I got the coconut club um vegan yogurt I either get this one or again the Oatly greek style yogurt I just got some plain white rolls and some bagels both probably just go in the freezer um so I've got them in stock and then I opted for the and the deliciously yellow are pretty much always my favourites at the moment I'm on their hazelnut pecan and maple bars they are expensive but I just enjoy them and then I didn't need too many tins I just got one cannellini beans one chickpeas some chopped tomatoes and some olives because I've been enjoying having more like salads or salad leaning meals as the weather's got nicer just got some raisins that I have in my oats every day some frozen Richmond meat free sausages I always have some of those in the freezer and then I got quite a lot of fresh produce because the sun's shining and I felt like having some fresh fruits and veggies so I got I haven't had grapes in forever and I just fancy them so I just got some standard red grapes some pico pico bella tomatoes chestnut mushrooms some organic bananas and then in the bags I've just got some loose couple of potatoes um one red onion courgette and a couple of brown onions and then hiding a wee garlic it's a good productive shop should keep me going for a little while we've got another blue sky day here in Hyden so I decided to make noise to it this morning and come out on a walk that I've not really spent a huge amount of time at it's Little Mill Forest which is kind of on the way to Loch Ness sort of um and I've only been here once when it was really raining and did a very quick walk so I wanted to I knew I wanted to come back and I thought it's such a beautiful day it'd be the perfect opportunity to do so and I'm actually following some directions on walk highlands on my app that combines both because there's two waymark trails this one combines both so it'll be about an hour and a half and yeah I just thought I don't want to stay inside I want to go outside I want to explore I want to be with nature and kind of the perfect way to cap off a lovely week