Updating my week

*phew*! I have managed to successfully complete the Pad challenge set by the lovely Debs and completed my target amount of Layouts each week. I even have one extra one I have not included and one sitting on the table that only needs a title cut out and suck on. Thats real fast scrapping for me!

And that was also with a sore hand. Yes the hand didnt really go down completely until Saturday and it is still painful today but I am sure nothing is badly damaged and I will live, I just cant do as much as I usually do.

This week's diary:
Last Monday I finally got round to making an appointment for my smear test - and no its not the 'Jade effect' that is hitting the news, my letter has been stuck on the fridge for quite a while now and I have had my family nagging me constantly so I finally got fed up with them and made the appointment.

We also got an invite over to Laura and Wayne's for dinner as Wayne invited Martin to watch Spurs (Yummy, thanks Loz)

Tuesday I drove off out into the countryside to find out how far a school advertising a Foundation Stage job was to me. Its only about 12 miles away but it turns out its all through windy country lanes and takes over half an hour to get to. I shall still apply though.

On Wednesday Laura rang me early to ask me to go get a vet collar (bucket) for Bailey the dog. He had been for 'the snip' and needed some after op TLC so Martin and I got to dogsit for the day. Bails was a really good boy, we bought him to our house and mainly he played in the garden quietly, although he did have a bit of a struggle to lay down and sleep anywhere. The weather had bucked up too, so Martin put the shelves back up in my greenhouse all ready for this year's bumper crop growing!

Thursday I had my hair trimmed. I put Debbie, my hairdresser under a spot of pressure, as she is not always consistant with my cuts, but last one, the girls were really impressed and kept telling me what a good cut it was. So I told Debs I wanted exactly the same again ... well she tried her best, and the good thing is that my hair does grow quickly. LOL

Another tiring day of supply work, including a ticking off from the secretary for taking the class out to break 5 mins early, and then a lovely surprise. Kelly and Ollie phoned from the train to ask if we had made any dinner arrangements. Being Friday Martin was at the golf club signing up for his weekly competition games so no we hadnt. Well did we want to join them at the Harvester for a meal? Did we ever?

So we collected them from the station and had a lovely chicken platter with them. They had vouchers for free sundaes and we had been looking forward to them having seen the concotions floating past us towards other tables. Alas it seems that the vouchers were not for the normal off the menu sundaes but for some horrible desert made from mostly melted soya milk (kelly is alergic to) no cream and somewhere burried in it a minute squeeze of topping, flavour of your choice. Martin ate his, Ollie polished off Kelly's and I simply didnt bother. Still the rest of the evening was fab (and thankyou Ollie for the treat).

We dropped them at the station, but 5 mins later they were back on our doorstep for a cup of tea as Kelly had not read the train timetable quite right LOL The week was closed by a very quiet weekend as Martin worked all Saturday and played golf Sunday plus watched his team defeated for most of Sunday afternoon, leaving me free to craft and, my latest obsession, play Nancy Drew games on my pc.

Garden leave

I may be the world's slowest paper scrapper, taking 3/4 days to stick a few papers together, but I can digi scrap real fast!

This is one I have just done while waiting for Martin to finish having a bath (took me 20 mins from beginning to end) and is a photo I took over the weekend. We had stopped for a breather so Ollie grabbed his 'How to' book.



All done with Chickidee a freebie kit from Sara at sweetblossomdesigns

Half term update

Work proper finally started on Wayne and Laura's build. This is coming down and two lovely new houses with intergrated garages are going on the site.

Laura wanted to do something 'fun' with me on the half term break, but neither of us could think of anything much to do.

On Wednesday we went back to the wedding gown shop for her to have another try on of her dress (I thought it was for the alteration fitting, but apparently that should be done six weeks before the wedding, so it was just a dress up session). She also chose her veil and headpeice.

Then we came back to her place and finished addressing all the wedding invites. Thursday she needed to catch up on school work, so with still no idea of what 'fun' thing we could do we found ourselves in Ikea at Lakeside on Friday buying stuff for decorating the wedding reception hall and making the favours (no clues).

Ikea takes so long to walk round, that we were too tired to do much in the way of looking for an outfit for me to wear at the wedding, Laura picked out a couple of outfits but she had grabbed the wrong size so they didnt fit. I am not too sure her idea of what suits me is anywhere close to what I think does, but I am open to ideas. We are going to go out again nearer the date, once the summer season hits the shops.

Friday evening I got a phone call from Kelly asking for me to join a gardening gang at her place the next day as they wanted to redesign (do something) with their back garden. This was going to be a bit of a problem because in my eagerness to be ready for Laura taking me dress shopping, I had slipped down 4 stairs, entangling my hand in the bannister, and at the point of the phone call it was rapidly swelling.

Luckily she had invited mum and dad too, so dad drove. But it was very frustrating not being able to do anything practical. I ended up sweeping leaves off the patio, while dad dug, mum made tea and Ollie and Kelly 'discussed' the overall design.

We only stayed a few hours, as dad was unsure of leaving his little hound for so long. I have spent the rest of the weekend rather fed up as there has been very little I could do with only my left hand. Annoyingly all my new goodies including my hostess gift turned up from SU! and have had to sit on the table unopenned. Luckily the swelling has gone down today and although still slightly painful (bruising I expect) I can at least do stuff now.

BBC book list

Apparently this is doing the rounds, I found it on Facebook but cant track down the original.

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.
.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (x)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (X+)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (X)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (X+)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (X)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (x)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (X)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (X)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (X+)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (X)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (Gave up half way through)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier(X)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (X+)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (Gave up as found so boring)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (X)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (X+)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (X+)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame(X+)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (X+)
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (X+)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (*)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (Started, not my cup of tea)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (X+)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (X)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (X)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (X+)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (X)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (Had to stop, too upsetting)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (X)
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (X)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (X+)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (X)
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome (X)
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (X)
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (X+)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker (X)
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (X)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (X+)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Some)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (X)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams (X+)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (X)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


41 - thats a few more than 6 then, Auntie Beeb!

This week's LOs.

And I am falling more and more in love with my little bug!

Proping up my eyes with matchsticks!

Last night the council shut the main road at the end of our road (about 20 metres away) and spent the entire night with heavy lorries, diggers, cement mixers and phuematic drills doing something or other! We had been pre-warned but only of the road closure, not to the extent of work and level of noise we would be subjected to .... I did try blocking it out with my ipod but around half one the batteries went.

So this one very tired blogee trying not to make too many typo's updating my blog.

Yesterday my dear friend Ann came for a visit and a very long natter. She used to be my brilliant TA when I was working full time and its lovely that during the holidays we can get together and have a huge catch up. She is the only person I still have contact with from the school which is really sad since I worked with most of the same staff for nearly twelve years if you include my teaching practise. I know as a teacher it is hard to maintain a social life but it would be nice if I could see more of my ex colleges.

Still Ann kindly bought over a lovely bunch of flowers and news of how everyone there is doing. She did nag me a little as I have not been updating my blog enough but to be honest little has been happening.

There are a few bits of news though and I have been doing plenty of scrapping thanks to Debbie's challenges on the Pad.

News items. Kelly got her results for the exams she took last year and past with flying colours. She is a fair way towards getting her second degree in accountancy now.

I have finally finished the wedding invites, both evening and day ones!

Martin was off all week last week but I had to work 2.5 days and he spent another 2 days laid up with a bad back..bad enough to visit the doctor, who after suggesting private physio, gave him some stronger painkillers which along with some day time tv cure, fixed his pulled muscle in a jiff. I have great faith in the doctors in our practise but apparently this particular locum was not up to the usual high standards and didnt even look Martin in the eye let alone examine him.

Of course that meant we did very little on his break although we did have a day at Bluewater where he got a brilliant bargin on a new jacket for a tenner.

I lost 2lb on my diet, a great start.

We dont do valentines but since Martin had to go back and work on sunday we did go to Toby for Sunday tea. Yummy it was too. Crafting and other stuff. I am not doing too well with my photo a day, well in fact I have been totally useless at it, but I have not given up entirely. So far this month...

The work on the monstrosity behind our garden continues - tell me that structure at the back is a shed? Huh! Those are our chimneys in the background.

I finally persuaded Martin to light the fire!



On my way to work, I stopped to snap the view across the Ashford valley.
My rhubarb is poking out its heads.
Spring finally is arriving - I didnt even know I had planted these croci
My fish look like they have come through the winter cold snap


These are finally finished and ready to go out.
And today's of the closed road.

Some scrapping!

Just a couple of LO's as I have finally finished the wedding cards.

The first is another entry for the Pad challenge to get us all scrapping



The second is a class from the UKS cyberclass but since I was well pasted the deadline its going as LO 1 for this weeks Pad challenge. My version of the Wild Cat class except I didnt want to do all the painting so used distress inks on the edges and an SU roller stamp as the background.

I cut the journal note and the butterfly swirl on my cricut using jpegs found on the net and then converted to 'svg files in inkscape. using Bo Bunny Back to Dots paper

Button up buttons,
thickers from my advent swap (thankee kindly)
studio g date stamps
loads of inking.

I'm still here.

I have not abandoned blog land, but I have been fairly busy the last couple of weeks. Some supply work is coming in, but most of it is quite a distance (for me) from home. I am now quite populare at both Deal and a school the other side of Ashford - so much so that the secretary there actually approached me to apply for the maternity leave vacancy. I have applied but wont be dissapointed if I dont get anywhere as the distance is wearing and its for KS2 which I know little about.

We have also been under the blanket of snow the rest of the country has suffered. I hate snow with a passion so I was not rushing around like a headless chicken trying to get photos like the rest of scrapbooking land, but snuggled in my craft room.

Laura's school closed early so she came over for a quick visit, but refused to go out in the cold and make snow-angels. She thinks about the same of snow as I do. I did manage to take a couple of photos the night before as it started to lay though.






I have also been busy crafting, as the Pad, in particular Debbie, is dedermined to get us all scrapping this year so have been running a series of open challenges to get our mojo going. This month we have to make at least 4 LO's (one a week) to be in with a chance of a small goodie give-away. Since one of my resolutions is to do more journalling, I thought a good way to get into that is to use information on my blog to jog my memory so I have started with 2007 photos, and made a paper version of this LO:

Original digi version

Latest paper version

I have also been very busy making wedding invites and evening invites for Laura and Wayne, but I will be blogging more about those once they have all been posted out.