A tardy blogger

I can't believe how long it has been since I last blogged. For me, anyway.

I wish I had the excuse that it was because I have been too busy but no, this is not reason. I just haven't had anything to say. I know, unusual for me I hear.

I did however do something yesterday. I had lunch. Not just any old ordinary lunch. Yesterday I was officially a "lady who lunched". I met up with a small(ish) group of friends at a fabulous restaurant, L'ortolan at Shinfield, just outside of Reading. The food was to die for and we had a fabulous time. Much laughter, fun, champagne, wine, petit fours, chatting, gossipping... well, you get the picture.

After lunch Cherry and I popped in to Costco and I was then even able to make Richard happy as I took home some of his favourites, The Works Bagels and a huge tray of pain au chocolat. Well, I had to repay him somehow for taking the day off work to watch the children, especially as it was a teacher training day!

A perfect weekend

and a Happy 11th Anniversary for Richard and me.

It was bliss. My mum and step-dad were coerced in to looking after the children for the weekend, so on early(ish) on Saturday morning Richard and I made a run for it and left for Portmeirion or rather our hotel Maes-Y-Neuadd which was just across the estuary.

The forecast for the weekend was rain, good job as we have a hosepipe ban currently, but fortunately for us from the time we arrived it was clear and didn't rain one little bit. The sun even came out in celebration!

The hotel was fabulous and the food was to die for. Absolutely scrummy, the staff were beyond good and one of the waiters, after chatting to us and finding out it was our wedding anniversary, had obviously had a word with the chef because when they brought out the dessert it had "Happy Anniversary" piped over it in chocolate sauce. Lick of lips!

Sunday it did rain but that suited us just fine and we spent the morning relaxing in our gorgeous suite. We left late morning and met up with our best friends who live in Shropshire for lunch. They had also arranged to have their children looked after my parents and so we got to spend some lovely adult to adult time, no interruptions from one of our children. Pure luxury.

All in all a fab weekend. Oh, and a photo, Richard and I on Saturday evening just before we went down to the restaurant for supper:

Oh and at home I don't know who had more fun. My mum and step-dad or the children! Snippets of conversations on our arrival home included "And Harriet opened the car door in the lion enclosure" "Grandad pushed me down the stairs, honest" and "Take a photo!". I'll expand more on these later...

ScrapManic 6

Woohoo! I'm all booked in! I've paid my deposit and it's on the calendar (in our house if it's not on the calendar it's not going to happen!).

I love ScrapManic, not only because lots of my friends will be there and it's sometimes the only place I get to meet up with them, but it's also a great venue, the classes are always first class and the food is yummy oh and there's a great bar! And I always come back feeling as if I've had a break.

Roll on November... well, maybe not too quickly because I do have a couple of other things to do before then.

I have another, bigger and slightly more expensive, new baby

So, today I bit the bullet and, after picking Noah up from pre-school, drove down to PaperArts and bought myself a CraftRobo!

I am now sitting at my desk blogging about this fact whilst my Robo is still in it's packaging and box by the side of my desk. Why? Therefore I am going to leave this post here and go and play... wish me luck.

I have a new baby

Which is good news but also bad news.

The bad news is that I have this new baby because I lost the old baby. Making any sense? I thought not.

OK, I'll start again. I have a new baby. It's a Canon Ixus 800 IS and is too cute for words. And the reason I've bought it is because I have lost, yes lost, my Pentax Optio, which was one of the smallest camera's ever and would fit in to my jeans pocket.

I've searched high and low for it and know that it went missing whilst we were still living at the rental house. I was sure it would turn up after the move and we'd unpacked all the boxes but sadly no. I know I have my Canon Digital Rebel but it is just too big to lug around for everyday use and I needed a small camera, one I could keep in my handbag.

Richard finally gave in to my nagging and today she arrived. I'm loving some of the features, being a gadget girl. One of which is that when you are viewing the photos on the camera's LCD screen if you then turn the camera round the photo changes so that no matter which way up you hold the camera the photo is always the right way up for you to view. Cool.

Took these photos of the children earlier this evening with it, which were taken without the flash but it has a stabilising mode on it so that it helps to reduce the 'shake'. Oh, and with Noah we're supposed to be looking at his poorly toe!

Christmas in May

OK, so it's not actually Christmas but I've done a Christmas layout.

I was really inspired by the LO that Ali Edwards did here and so after Christmas decided to keep back some of my cards and do something similar. Well, 5 months later they are still being moved from room to room, from pile to pile and bizarrely every time I came across them I would think "Christmas cards. Why do I still have Christmas cards?" and then it would all come flooding back. Christmas cards, Ali Edwards, layout...

So, I find them, again, today and went through the ritual. Christmas cards. Why do I still have Christmas cards? However this time I thought, you know, I should just throw them away. But then I thought NO, don't throw them away, sit yourself down and do the darn LO! So that's what I did.

Feeling kind of low

I don't want to go in to it here but I'm feeling a little low today. Instead I'm going to just concentrate on some positive things:

• Loving the fact that whilst pottering around the supermarket on Sunday I bumped in to 4 different sets of friends. Two of which I haven't really managed to catch up with since we moved back. It's such a nice feeling to just see people you know whilst going about your everyday life. I missed that in Canada.



• Loving the fact that whilst some people moan about the state of the youth and yobs in this country that they can prove it's not always true. I was waiting at the checkout and the 2 tattooed rather scary looking men/boys ahead of me were so polite and considerate and they even helped me!



• Loving meeting up with scrapping friends and having some good old fun, laughing at the fact that Emma and Jane turned up both wearing almost identical outfits, making it to the crop in one piece even though Corinna was driving, and re-meeting Fi again.



• Loving completing, not 1, not 2, not 3 but 4 layouts at Fiona's recent PaperArts crop:

   


   

I know they are nothing fancy but I'm pleased with them. It's another 3 layouts completed and in my album. And no, I did not buy Noah's t-shirt to go with the patterned paper, it just so happened they match perfectly!

And I know I've only posted 3 layouts but the 4th just needs a little tweaking before I'm completely happy with it.

I feel like cropping tonight

Even though I am unbelievably tired I'm still going to Fiona's PaperArts Friday evening NYOBC (Not Your Ordinary Book Club by Pinecone Press). The down side is trying to get myself all organised, something I am determined to be tonight. I'm also going to be spending tomorrow at Fiona's too so I'm in for a weekend of scrapbooking.

Hopefully I'll get my mojo back. I think it's coming, even if it's a slow process.

However my Banana Frog stamps and papers have come and they are inspiring indeed. I plan on using them at least once this weekend. They really are very, very lush. I even went out yesterday and bought a little A5 binder just to store my stamps in.

OK, I'm off to pack up my stuff now, hopefully when I 'speak' to you next I'll have lots of work to show you! Yeah, and pigs might fly

Scanning

I knew I should have bought the 3590. Epson Perfection 3590 Photo scanner that is. I bought the 3490 under the misunderstanding it was the 3590. What was I thinking?

On the face of it there aren't many differences. They both scan negatives and convert them in to digital jpg files. So that's good but the major difference is that with the 3590 you have this little thingamajig in the top that you just feed the negatives in to and it scans them and then pops them back out. With the 3490 I have to manually take the special adaptor out, manually feed the negative in to the correct slot, put it back in to the scanner and scan and keep repeating for every slide. Not good. It's turning out to be a slow and tedious procedure and I am going to go completely insane doing it. But me being me I will have to persevere until I have scanned all my negatives and have got them all burnt on to disk. I can't leave a job part finished. I just hate it when the perfectionist in me comes out and I just have to keep at something even when I'm starting to hate it.

What's the bet that Richard won't let me go and buy the 3590? LOL!

Oh, well, I'm going to cheer myself up by buying a can, or two, of compressed air to blow the dust of my negatives. That'll cheer me up!

On a good note I am loving the pictures I am rediscovering. Too cool and I now have all these retro 80s layout ideas going around in my head. And strangely I am finding myself singing 80s songs whilst I'm scanning them too.

Here's one of me and my dad, now no laughing, I'm looking very 80s glam!

On new lush stamps, a LO and a new job

Have you seen Banana Frog ? If you haven't you should! It's a new British store that has been opened by the lovely Bev Fletcher and she has designed and produced some lush, lush stamps. They are gorgeous. Of course I need them all. But it's not only stamps she produces, she has some really unusual papers too. Some I've not seen in the UK before, actually not in Canada either! I particularly like this one by Sugar Lily.

Did another LO over the weekend. It was slow to finish as I realised that I didn't have any brown cotton for the sewing machine so had to nip out and get some. One good thing though is that I used the sewing machine I bought in Canada, plugged it in to a transformer and it worked. Result. The bad thing was the tension is all over the shop and you should see the back of the layout!

And finally, for this post anyway, Richard starts his new job today. I'm having mixed feelings about this. On the one hand it will be great to get back to some normalcy, some routine and structure to the day but on the other hand I will miss him. I've used to having him at home. It's been six months. And yes, he was working from home but I could just pop my head around the door and ask if he'd like a coffee or he'd make one for me or we'd just chat for a little bit. I'll miss that. I won't miss not being able to blast out the music while I'm doing the housework or knowing that if I don't do anything all day and just sit on the sofa I can't say to him "I've been so busy today, darling, I haven't stopped" because he knows I haven't! LOL!

This also feels like our final bit of the jigsaw in settling back in the UK. That link with work in Canada and Bermuda was still sort of holding us there, especially as he was expected to work Canadian hours some days. But it is the right thing to do, it's right for me and the children and right for Richard too. So good luck darling.

Bank holiday weekend

Blah, I spent ages typing up a whole blog entry and then something went wrong with my browser and I lost the whole lot. Grrrrr, don't you just hate when that happens?

So, I am not going to repeat myself. I will just give a little summary:

• Weather. Just beautiful. In fact we've noticed how little rain there has been since we've been back in England. Apart from the small blip whilst my mother-in-law was here which unfortunately meant she couldn't get out and about so much.



• We've been in the garden nearly all day today.



• No, not sitting and relaxing but erecting our "spaceship".



• Said "spaceship" is in fact a cedar wood play set which we bought just before we left Canada.



• It wouldn't have looked out of place in our 3 acres there but is looking "slightly" too large in our cute little english garden.



• Noah will love it though. It has a slide, 2 swings, a hanging thingy, monkey bars, a rope ladder, a sand pit and a rock climbing wall. Oh, and a picnic table underneath. Impressive, eh? The deck area is big enough for all 3 children to sit comfortably.



• You can tell we've all been in the garden, evidence of it has been
  traipsed all through the conservatory, dining room and hallway!



• Robins. Awwww! We've seen so many of these in our garden this year. I have to say they are much nicer looking than their North American counterparts which are huge. We think we have a pair nesting in the ivy on our garden wall.



• Snapped this, complete with wiggling worm, about an hour or so ago (where I also got to use my fab telescopic lens), click on it for a larger view: