Monday 14 January 2008

Busy doing nothing....

or so it seems!

Today has been one of those days when I have spent most of the time either clearing up or transporting loads of stuff upstairs and then loads of stuff downstairs. I think I just need to have a massive clearout then I won't spend hours running up and down the stairs like this!

I did get to meet Sam and Amy for lunch which was definitely a nice thing. Amy has about two months to go until the baby is due but she seems to be doing more running around than ever. Sam is hoping for an interview for the manager's job next week. She will be just perfect for that so my fingers are crossed. Apart from that we chatted about all the good stuff we have coming up over the next two months :) The Ickenham weekend crop is looking pretty likely now and thats only a few weeks away, I'm hoping to join Sam, Amy and Nat on Wednesday to see Wicked in London which will be cool. Then I have a month off work (yay!!), the first week is half term so I get to spend some time with Holly when she isn't revising, then it is my birthday so we are hoping to go on a spa day, then I go to South Africa for 10 days - I am so looking forward to catching up with Venessa again. And then we have a girls weekend away at Centre Parks in early March - just before I go back to work. I know most people will be scrapbooking, but we plan to spend a day in the spa, walk the trails, eat and drink lots and generally just relax for the few days. And then it is ScrapFever....which I am so looking forward to. Karen Russell's class looks amazing and Shim is a fab teacher no matter what she does so that will be a fabby weekend. So just a few more weeks at work then all this to look forward to.

I had a long chat with Venessa yesterday (about 1 1/2 hours...I'm not thinking about my phone bill :( ) and it was great to catch up on the last couple of months. Ty starts playschool on Thursday; I can hardly believe it. He was only 6 weeks old when they went back to S. Africa and it will be almost two years since I last saw him when I go over next month. He will have changed so much. It will be good to see Hannah and Luke as well and I guess they will be a lot different now. There is a new shopping complex since I was last out there so we will have to check it out of course! It would be rude not to :)

Anyway not much else has happened. I finally got my car insurance renewed after about 3 hours on the phone trying to better my quote. I HATE getting insurance quotes, it is never 2 minutes, more like 2 hours when you have finished giving them all that information :( Anyway, it is done now.

I had a very lazy weekend; Sunday I didn't get out of my jammies until about 5pm which was very nice. Infact I would have got straight back into them after my bath but we went next door to play cards for the evening. So I drunk too much wine, ate too much chocolate and tortilla chips but I didn't lose at cards for once - yay! But we only played 'chase the lady' so I guess it wasn't that much of an achievement lol. Holly won which was pretty cool. Saturday, I went over to Amy's crop but I didn't get much done as I talked way to much....but I hadn't seen Sara for months and months and her daughter is in her first year at Med School, so lots to talk about.

Anyway, that's me caught up. Now to cook dinner.....

Friday 11 January 2008

Scrapbooking....

These are my recent pages from SI.... this is probably overkill but this is all I have done over the last few months apart from the unpublished stuff. So in no particular order.....


Xmas photos from years past.


The advent calendar project had to be changed as it didn't photograph well. This is what it originally looked like without the red background.


Holly off to a party.


Dedicated to Sean and his presents.


I was taking photos of some of the artist bears for insurance purposes many years ago when I collected them. I forgot I had these of Holly.


One of my favourite pages I have ever made...even if the inspiration was from a clothing label - totally.


Using my water colour pencils. I saw some in WHSmiths the other day - half price and I am very tempted.


This started off as an 8.5x11 but it just didn't work so I stuck it on to a piece of 12x12 and carried on...


Maybe I saw the Proclaimers a tad too much this year but they were just fab :)


I just love these photos of Holly....


I went back to Thassos in 2005 and in all honesty nothing seemed to have changed!But these were from my trip back in 1993?

Anyway, that's caught up on all my pages. Now I just need to do get on and do some more this weekend :)

Is it really three months...

since I last posted on here? I can't believe how quickly time has passed and it is impossible to even think about catching up. The end of the year was so busy at work, so combined with Christmas shopping I seemed to have no free time. But we had our Christmas a week early. Most of my family came down for the weekend; we had our stockings, presents and Christmas dinner on the Sunday and it was all lovely. But it did seem quite strange going up to the shops though as in my head I had really convinced myself it was Christmas and nothing should have been open! Truly I shouldn't have been going shopping BUT Holly decided that she really did want the first jacket she had tried on on the Saturday for her Christmas present from my mum and could we go and buy it for her as she had a footie match? So my mum and I stopped off from prepping the dinner and walked up only to find that it had been sold just that morning.... and it was the only one they had! Mmmn...I'm sure beating your kids really isn't a crime! Apart from that little unnecessary trip the rest of the weekend was great and it was good to catch up with everyone.

Then....we went to Lapland for Christmas itself. What an amazing holiday. I loved it all. And it snowed on Christmas day (the real one :))so a White Christmas! We stayed in a log cabin; it was huge. It could have slept 9 although there was just the three of us. With a log fire and a sauna. It was perfect.

We went for a night skidoo trip the first night; a 90 minute ride through the fells and forests with just our headlights to light the way. Then we spent two days searching for Father Christmas; during which we spent hours sledging (brilliant fun), snowball fights, more skidoos (not nearly so fast as the night trip) reindeer rides, huskie rides, sleigh rides, more sledging, eating, visiting Santa's post office, workshop and finally the great man himself. It could only have been better if I was five! I did ask Santa why he had such a good London accent? He pointedly said that he had been in Lapland for 400 years. Oh well....but then his sleigh must have stopped working because strangely he caught the same flight back to the UK as us! So funny. Actually he and his wife (Mrs Claus) were both lovely and had had a nice three weeks playing Father Christmas. They said they were off to Moscow the following year! Strangely, none of the other families or their children seemed to realise Santa came home with them :)

I will have to sort out my photos which unfortunately were not that good. Even with the ISO set to 1600 and the widest aperture, I still had blurred photos. But these are a few of them....


Meeting a reindeer....


and huskies


I think this was a sunset through the clouds but as we never actually saw the sun it was hard to tell.


Skiing on our free day. Looking down the blue run. There was no way I was stopping on the red run to take photos...well there was no way I was stopping! I swear the slope was vertical.


Roy, Holly and new friends Messina and Emma.


Mina (pronounced Mika) our fabby tour guide. I have only just got the elf song out of my head....

So as you can see we got one days skiing in and then Holly and I went back on our last morning as we had time to get one hours worth of skiing in before we had to catch the bus back to the airport. We managed 7 runs in that hour although I think I counted more bruises than that when I got home. I had forgotten how much ski boots hurt!
The only disappointment with the whole holiday? The weather was reasonably warm 0 to -3 degrees and mostly overcast. Totally the wrong conditions for the Northern Lights. I was so disappointed that we didn't get to see them but I guss it means I just have to go out again. In fact I have checked out a few websites for a long weekend to Luosto.....