More of Yorkshire

So on to Tuesday, and not such a sunny start. I had told Martin that enough was enough and it was time he stopped driving and had a chill out day, so the plan was to stay at the cottage, maybe a trip out to the nearby village but mainly NO driving. Well that lasted until about 10 o'clock by which time, we had had breakfast, I had played solitary sudolu, and started a watercolour of the garden in the boiling sun (yes the weather had rapidly changed and it was hot, hot, hot!). Martin was obviously bored too because it didnt take more than a couple of words to persuade him to get back behind the wheel.

Amongst all the hundreds of tourist leaflets I had picked up from various shops along the way, was one describing a 'craft' trail, following a circular route starting at Hawes, 4 miles down the road, we could visit the cheese factory, the felt factory, the sheep dog demo, the waterfalls, candle making, rope works, the county museum and several other wonderful places. Sounded good so off we went.

We started in Hawes where we managed to buy me a hat (purple baseball cap, but at least it kept the sun out of my eyes) and after a quick squizz at the local market stalls, we headed to the rope making demos. Now Mart was facinated but to me it was rather small potatoes since I had already seen the demos at Chatham where the supposedly longest rope making shed in existance still makes ropes. However it was still interesting, although as a working factory there was little to tell us what was going on, we just got to watch the two guys making rope.

The rope making place backed onto the country museum, which also held the Tourist information shop. We had being seeing signs and directions to these all over Yorkshire but had yet managed to actually find one, but it was a little late into the week to find the free information of much use, we still enjoyed browsing all the leaflets and suggestions though. The museum, unlike most town museums was not free to enter, and neither could we see how big it was or what delights it might hold. At £3 a shot, we decided we really didnt want to take the risk of paying £6 to see what might only be a few rusty relics.

Mind you, outside it was perfectly possible to see all this for free, so maybe the artifacts may have been a bit more exciting than a few Roman coins and a collection of someone's 1810 photos. Before we left Hawes, a must was the Wensleydale Creamery where all the Wensleydale cheese is made. This was really interesting, first a musuem with loads of cheese and butter making artifacts alongside some old farming instruments and loads of info on how the creamery came into existence from a very well made video presentation, and then into the veiwing room where you could witness the production of that day's cheese being made.

My first few photos were pretty poor as the viewing window was pretty filthy. Then I discovered I could zoom in and get much better shots.

Not expecting a picnic opportunity I had thrown a cold drink, apples, cheese, and some crisps into the car, so before carrying on along the craft trail we sat in a feild, admired the view
and munched our snack as it was now gone 1 o'clock. We hadnt got far around the actual trail but we were having fun. A good job too as the rest of the trail was not quite as sucessful.

Next on the list was the Felt gallery and a waterfall worth photographing. We found the village easily, and parked up. The first thing we noticed was a sign saying that parking within the village was free but they would welcome donations towards the upkeep of the church, written in rather menacing tones. Mmm, strange. The felt museum turned out to be a private house with the upstairs open to the public. It looked rather forboding so we gave that a miss and turned to find the walk up to the waterfalls. As we had driven through the village we had seen a pathway advertised at the local pub. Martin said he could do with a drink so we went in. It turned out the waterfall access (not the waterfall) was across private land and they were charging £5 per person for the priviledge!! Not in this life, mister! We had seen waterfalls in Yosimite for free, much better than you could ever offer, so no thanks.

We had a swift half and got back in the car for the next installement. A drive across Butertubs pass with spectacular views across the Swaledale valley. The countryside up until now had been beautifully manicured, sheep grazing in every field, well kept dry stone walls surrounding pretty stone cottage farm houses. Out here it got a bit wilder,

the walls dissappeared and the sheep wandered in the roads, contained only by the lay of the land and cattle grids. Which invariably meant they wandered in front of cars!! The candle making demo's were suspended throughout June, but by now we were getting pretty tired so we decided to give the rest of the trial a miss and cut across country back to the cottage. Even this took us the best part of an hour as although the roads were good, there was no direct routes, and we meandered back and forth across the dales. We had intended to stop at Asgwrath falls but again the steep cost of the parking detered us and we pushed on for base camp. Finally we arrived back, and although tired we decided to hace one more short excursion to see the lake situated just behind Bainbridge.


Here the roads got very very narrow, and at one point seemed little more than a dirt track, which is where we spotted these little bundles of fluff! Wild pheasant chicks!!

Morcambe

Kate Hatfield template, Miss Mint kit.

Its so easy to look at a map and think, wow, thats fairly near, lets just carry on up the road a bit. Well its what we tend to do a lot, which is why after a fairly exhausting morning looking around caves and walking dales, we decided to just nip up the road to Morcambe, and maybe even drop in Kendale on the way home!

Of course it didnt take long to realise it was further than we thought but it was beautiful countryside and so we just kept going. Despite the crowded seafront we managed to find a parking space virtually opposite the memorial of the one and only great Eric Morcambe. What a wonderful tribute the town have made to the genius of comedy, the stairs up to the statue are engraved with the words of 'Bring me sunshine', he's clever catchphrases are embedded in the paving slabs below and around him are stars depicting the major contributers to the art work. Martin was over the moon when he spotted that one of them was his very own employers Morrisons. And, well, you just have to dont you?

We looked for our hats, but would you adam and eve it, even though Morcambe is a traditional seaside town (all be it a bit tired and run down) there were no traditional bucket, spade and sun hat shops. We walked into town and managed to get sun screen in Boots, where a very confussed assistant tried to direct us to the nearest Morrisons (via the sea if we had followed her instructions) as we needed to stock up on basics and believe it or not, having only done about 400 miles a tank of petrol. We tanked ourselves up too, stopping in a beach front pub for a bacon roll and a coffee (it was on offer and the roll on its own was £1.20 dearer than if we had the coffee with it!). We also got chatting to a lovely old couple from Stoke who's highlight of the holiday was to be the meal they were just about to get in Weatherspoons! Ah bless.

Despite the milage, the hiking, the pot holing and the hour spent shopping in the supermarket (the latter being so few and far between in Yorkshire we stocked up for the week worried we would not find civalisation again soon) we still had enough energy and enough sun rays left to enjoy a BBQ in the little cottage garden.



Not a bad second day to our holiday.

Up north ... and outfitted

The last two and a bit weeks have been spent scouring shops for the final bits of my wedding outfit for Laura's wedding. I managed to get a really pretty dress off the Littlewoods cat. ages ago but still needed to get all the accessories that turn a simple dress into a fabbie wedding outfit. I decided to start with the jacket so that I could work in the colour scheme.

The dress, a grey based blue has cream embroidered flowers, pinkish seed beads and silver sequins (it sounds horrid, but honest it is really sweet). Now this should have given me scope for plenty of colours in a jacket, pink, blue, cream, ivory, grey, or even a green in the same hue. Laura andI went into town and visited every single womanswear shop we could think of. I wasnt being fussy, anything smart in my size would have done. We simply couldnt find many jackets and they were all either black or white!

Exhausted and out of car parking time, we came home I started searching the net. Still no luck. This was posing a problem as it is a strappy dress and really needs more than a cardigan to finish the look.

Anyway, pushing the problem to one side, Saturday Martin and I set off for a week in the Yorkshire Dales, where we had rented a little cottage for a bit of a get away. After five and a half hours of fairly pleasant driving, we arrived in the village of Bainbridge to an interesting sight.

Travellers on the green, horse racing.

Yorkshire villages are full of wonderful stone cottages and narrow lanes with no street parking. There was a spot for leaving our car a little way down the lane from our cottage but too far for two road weary oldies to carry heavy suitcases, so we opened the little swing gate to the road running behind the three cottages terraced with ours. No sooner than we had removed the last case than the wonderful friendly man from the end of the road arrived to greet us at the door ..... no actually it was to have a right moan and winge about us parking the car there! Did we know he had solicitors letters and everything against the shower who owned the cottage to stop this sort of thing ..blah, blah, blah. What a sad old git he must have been. Well we bowed and scrapped and doffed our caps, then after moving the car, retireing into the kitchen for a good giggle.

Stone cottage - front door with back garden?

Comfy cottage

The cottage was everything you would expect from a yorkshire stone built home, and it did us proud for the week. The only downsides being that there was no mobile phone signal in the middle of the downs, and it was also quite a way into the dales, meaning long drives to anywhere. In fact Martin managed to do most of his first 1000 miles driving on his new car during the week we were there.

Although I had packed quite a bit of food for the week, we needed bread for our tea, so as soon as we had unpacked we travelled another 4 miles into Hawes, a small market town with several pubs and some great small supermarkets. This looked like it was going to be a good week.

The first morning dawned hot and sunny so for a treat we had a full english breakfast set up properly in the garden. Stuffed to the brim we then headed off to Hadlow Carr, the RHS garden. On our way we passed through Masham, supposedly the most visited village in the Dales. We couldn't really work out the attraction but were surprised to spot these sights in the car park!

Is that really the garden shed making up the back of that car?

Maybe they have heard of the government scrappage scheme?

The guys actually turned the engine over and the car moved into its parking space under its own steam!

Neither of us had been prepared for the heat, and pretty soon we were in desperate need of hats, suntan lotion and drink. However we did not let that spoil our day, and had a wonderful journey through time as we inspected the gardens of Edwardian, Victorian, pre and post war England as well as a 1960's and 1980's garden. Then we laughed to see they were using a similar system of veg growing as I was at home, knowing that my dad had insisted it would not work.





It was certainly working for the RHS.

The maze was in the wooded part of the garden, the upside down trees confused us -

-the maze didnt.
We drove home via Harrigate - which we didnt like much, and Skipton which we did like but were too tired to spend much time in. Already we were clocking up the miles and although the countryside is spectacular, we decided a meal in the local pub was on the cards. Unfortunately the pub was shut, not opening for another 2 hours so we ended up back in Hawes where the local cafe did us proud with a huge roast beef dinner!

Martin isn't so in to gardening, so I was surprised that he enjoyed the day so much. Still to be fair, having had my choice I insisted that on day two he chose where we should go. He chose the caves . . not my cup of tea at all, but looking at the map, a visit to a hole in the ground would leave us close to the coast, so I agreed to a trip to Morcambe afterwards..

Martin had chosen the longer of the two caves on offer, but as we pulled into the car park not only did a coach load of school kids pull up too, but everyone was wearing cold weather gear, while we were in shorts and tee's. We drove onto the next cave, as the broachure assured us we could walk it in ordinary clothes, passing the 'Harry Potter' viaduct.



The only problem with the second choice cave was the mile long nature trail to get to the cave. Leaving the car in the village of Clapham, (not in the National Park facility as they wanted £3 for 2 hours) we climbed the hill and treked through the trail. All up the side of a dale, it was a long hot walk, but full of lovely sights, a huge lake,

waterfalls,

dappled green trees full of song birds, and a very strange shell grotto,


There was a bit of a wait at the cave while the party of old folks finished their tour, but there were only us and a young man and his 10 year old daughter on our tour, so it was an intimate affair, and really interesting. I couldnt take photos in the cave but this is the outside - not very interesting but at least it proves we went! LOL



Morcambe to follow ......

Yay!! Its the holidays!

After two years doing supply, I wasnt appreciating school holidays, since most days stuck at home were boring and rather lonely. But after completing a full term at work, once more I am on holiday and looking forward to the coming weeks.

I think Laura has a few plans for me in order to help her finish off the wedding preparations, and then Martin and I have a further week booked, in a cottage on the Yorkshire Dales. Meanwhile I have a ton of gardening to do (I cant believe how much everything has grown since I have been away, in only four days) a stack of wedding stationary to finish (I still haven't sourced those red eyelets though) and I can then spend some time playing with other bits of paper in my craft room.

Its great to be back home, after a week dog sitting and I am looking forward to two whole weeks just relaxing and smelling the roses!!

Where have I been

Busy working!!

What started as one weeks supply work has turned into a whole term! I am ill prepared for full time work now, totally unfit and unused to the world of 5 days a week earning a living lark.

So that has left little energy or time for much else.

Preparations for the every nearing wedding continue, I have finally found a dress that I like and fits, just need accessories now, I went along with the bridesmaids to share in the design process as they are having them made, I am busy making order of service cards and the name labels for the tables (this is proving a bit difficult as I cant seem to source the 100 red eyelets I need for them. I cant change the design as I have already made 20 ... watch this space), and slowly things are getting ticked off the long 'to-do' list.

I have also spent lots of time in the garden, mainly planting out as the greenhouse, although on its last legs since the wood is so rotten its a wonder it can hold in the broken glass window panes, has done very well, and nearly all the seeds I have planted have germinated at 100% success rate. The only real losses have been my cucumbers which grew to nearly 9" and then succumbed to a caterpillar in the roots which killed them all off. However hopefully in a month or so's time we will be enjoying a riot of colour from the hundreds of petunias and other bedding plants, plus looking forward to munching the other veggies I have planted. The strawberry plants have gone mad and have huge fruits on them already.

We have had a few family get togethers, Martin had a bbq for his birthday, we went to see the new Star Trek movie with Laura and Wayne, and working in a school so close to Kelly meant I got to call in for a cuppa and an update on her garden this week when she had a study day off.

Yesterday Martin collected his new car from the garage, and is proudly driving around in it. We went to the Harvester to celebrate it last evening, mainly because I am dog sitting while Mum and Dad are on holiday so I needed feeding.

So if anyone has missed me, I am still about, just busy with teaching, weddings, gardening and general life!

Poor neglected blog.

I have been working supply cover full time for the last two weeks and am booked for another full week next week (including a school trip which should be fun as we are going to see my fav. animals, sheep!) so poor blogland has been rather neglected of late. The supply school is a 55 mile round trip away which means much too early mornings and collapsing on the settee when I get home, but they are a lovely class with just enough challenge to keep me on my toes.

All that hasnt left much time for real life events but we have done a few exciting things. Last Sunday, since the government announced the car scrappage scheme and were happy handing out two grand for our old metal box on wheels, we went to have a look round the new car show rooms. Laura had reccommended the Mazda 2, not a car we would normally have gone for, but we thought we would make that one of our ports of calls. We stopped in the Toyota place on the way, where we giggled over the Eygo. A strange little beastie, really small, mostly made from plastic, an ugly shape, and ....... we liked it. Realising we sounded just ike Gezza Clarkson we left, laughing our heads off (to the quizical looks of the sales man) and made for the Mazda garage.

The showroom, a huge huge area, housed only 3 of their sports car ranges so we were a bit daunted, but the receptionist took us outside to look at the Mazda 2. Martin fell in love with it at once and we quickly queued up to sort out the deal with the salesman. Better still they were offering nort percent finance! As we chatted to the sales guy we liked the car more and more, especially as they were giving £400 worth of metalic paint away too, so he trotted off to check availability. We nearly fell of our chairs when he told us the first date anything could be delivered was August!!!! We thought the industry was in trouble...well maybe this is why? The salesman could see how unhappy we were and suggested that we might like the diesel model he had in the pound which he could let us have for the same price even though it was a step up model as they were being discontinued. He went off to get it and we were even more excited when we heard the way it purred and sat in it with the engine running.

"OK so this counts as a new car?" asked Martin. "Then I have a 10 year old peugot I want to use in the Scrappage deal"
"We're not doing it" said the sales guy.

We just couldnt believe it. I had known that the manufactures had to match the government - a £1000 each (Martin hadnt) but we both were under the impression it was obligitory for all companies to take it up. No apparently not. Martin was gutted. No way could we afford it without the government's money. He got quite sharp with the poor sales bloke, but it couldnt be helped, we had to walk away.

The rest of the afternoon wasnt much better, many places were so swamped with customers (we followed the same people round obviously doing the same as us) that they didnt have enough sales people on call (many only having the usual sunday skeleton staff), most didnt have up to date price lists (how sus is that?) Renault couldnt even tell us the price of the Chloe!!And some dealers had simply put the prices up by so much we couldnt even afford a basic model, Ford has put the price up from the £5,600 I paid for my KA 14 months ago to a whopping £10,500!!!!!

Finally with only 15 mins to go before closing time, we arrived at the Peugot garage, where Martin asked 3 simple questions. We were staggered when finally someone gave us straight answers without having to check price lists, or see to three other customers at the same time, but actually knew what they were doing and talking about.

"Are you doing the scrappage scheme? "
"Yes"
What's the price of your basic car?"
£8000
"What finance do you do?" To which the guy explained the finance deal was actually better off getting the next model up since the interest on more money lent went down and you ended up paying back the same amount.




Waayhay!

So come the end of May Martin will have brand new wheels (not yellow ones though, again the only other basic colour red wasnt going to be available until August so the dealership has gone halves on the price of metallic blue) and the government will be short one grand.

Back in '74

Dont you just love what photoshop can do.


This is an old (ok I am willing to admit it, its me and DH taken in 1974) on a kodak instamatic.
A bit of a short play in photoshop and its still me and DH back in '74 but now its a much rescued digital image! (of course it hasnt made DH's hair grow back irl though)

Easter hols,long and rambling

Wow, I can't believe how long it is since I last blogged. Mind, its mostly been same old, same old, so it would have been pretty boring blogging if I had come on before.

So what have I been up to? Well, not a lot of crafting as I am well into 1st and third person, point and click adventure games at the moment, having covered all but one Nancy drew, and all four CSI games in the last four weeks.

I have also been busy in the garden, sowing more seeds, and pricking out those that are growing well, and have even put a few out in the garden!

There has been a few fun and games worthy of reporting though.

The schools are on holiday now, so Laura and I were nipping over to the Papermill to stock up on more card/paper to finish off the wedding stationary (name cards and OOS still to go). Wayne and her have also had to sign up for another 6 months in the rental place so have decided to jazz it up, so I said I would buy them plants instead of eggs for their easter gift. This entailed a stop off at Bybrook Barn Garden Centre to look at the flowers she might want.

As soon as we walked through the door, she spotted the pet hall and wanted to go see. I dragged her round the indoor plants for a while but it was obvious she could only focus on the animals so gave in and got dragged into the fish tank area. Of course then she wanted a fish! She doesnt have a tank set up but she does have a large fish bowl (for the wedding decorations) so after an expensive hot chocolate and sausage roll in the cafe, I agreed to buy just one fish for their pressy instead of plants.

So thats how Gill the Red Cap arrived on her table in a fish bowl, worrying the life out of her as he didnt seem to want to swim. Thankfully this was just stress from change of home and soon he was busy zipping round the tank.

The follow-up was the next day though when I got another panic phone call. Wayne and her had been out to buy another two fish following on from the sucess of Gill, but the small bowl, with no air pump was not up to giving life to three water breathing creatures, one had already died, one was in a bad state and Gill was failing fast. She was phoning me for moral support as she did CPR through a straw into the water and waited for Grandad to arrive with his fish tank pump. The good news is that the crash team arrived in time and Gill and Bill are doing fine.

Dad has also been up to fun and games. His next door neighbour, around the same age as me,blonde and living up to her image had phoned my parents from Tesco car park. He quite often has to go rescue her from the dippy scrapes she gets into. This time the new(ish) car her hubby had just got her refused to open to the electronic key, and she with a full barrowload of shopping including icecream. So dad went up there, thinking that if he couldnt get the key to work at least she could put all her shopping into the boot of his car and he could bring it home for her. Anyway, after both of them spending some time attempting to open the car, they did just that, but as Dad was driving them both out of the carpark, intending on getting her other half to sort out the car, she spotted another car, which she said was the same as hers. Thinking she was joking, dad pulled up alongside it and told her to blip the car key at it. Yes, you are there before me, of course it opened. They had both been trying to get into the wrong car!!!!

So apart from gardening, playing 'puter games and messing about tryng to make order of service cards what else have I been up to?

Not much really.

Martin had to work all Easter weekend and as Laura and Wayne were away in Arendel for a night, we invited Kelly and Ollie and mum and dad over for Easter Sunday lunch which was very yummy.

We had to have Bailey dog for the night when Laura went up to London to see a friend and Wayne flew off to Barcelona for his stag do. The dog was really well behaved but it was good fun and games keeping him and the cat apart, especially when Bails refused to be left alone in the kitchen all night, barking his dismay for nearly half an hour until we swapped them over and let the dog have the run of the house and the cat got shut in the front room.

We have booked our holiday for this year, hiring a cottage in the Yorkshire Downs.

The girlies all went and gave their design ideas and measurements to the lady making their bridesmaid dresses, a teacher friend of Laura's. I am convinced that if she can find the time as a full time teacher to make three bridesmaids dresses as well, then secondary school teachers really do have it easy compared to Infant school teachers, because there is no way I would have had time or energy to do that when I was working full time.

I took mum out and she managed to get herself a dress for the wedding, I am still struggling and starting to panic a bit now. If anyone sees something suitable for a very short, overweight, large busted lady to wear to a summer wedding please point me in the right direction.

As promised, the garden.

I have been doing a little bit of crafting, but to be honest my mojo seems to have deserted me a little at the moment.

I made this card for Wayne and Laura in order to hide the cheque for our contribution to the wedding in. The front bit is acutally a pocket. Wayne was sooo impressed, he actually spent more time cooing over the card than worrying about the money LOL



I used SU! Polka dots stamps, the hostess set of stamps and lots of empossing powder, and souffle sukara pens.

I have been working loads to get the garden into some sort of shape, and want to put the pics on here so that, next year when I see lots of open bits of space in the flower beds I will know which bits need filling and which bits will eventually sprout something. What usually happens is I see bare ground and find a burning desire to plant something in it, only to find later that there already were things under the ground and ending up with some places way over crowded. Hopefully photos will stop that happening

My square foot garden and an unsuccessful attempt to warm up the soil and protect it from cats and foxes. I didnt take into account the high winds though.

Some new perrenial plants and lots of bark make this little corner, usually a home for ivy and brambles much tidier.

Martin cut down the huge overgrown bush, which has let in much more light to the garden and also given me the room to weed and mulch this bed. Its still a problem to plant up as its always in the shade.




The troughs that fur baby Pumpkin bought me for mother's day filled with the bulbs Laura gave me.



The fruit bed still needs a bit of weeding and mulching but we have run out of bark - so have B&Q!! Amazingly this morning I noticed that some of the strawberries have flowers on them!

This bit is always a mess as its hard to stop the lilac tree putting out offshoots or planting amongst the roots. However I have developed a few arm muscles pulling out the ground ivy and putting the bark down. It was worth the effort though.

Genaral view looking towards the house, Martin has spiked and seeded the lawn to help make it a bit thicker.




And finally a peek into the green house and all the small plantletts that will hopefully grow big enough to fill all those gaps.

The eye's have it.

Well they have something anyway. Finding it a struggle to see small print, and having a £5 eye test voucher from Specsave, on Sunday I toddled off to get my eyes seen to for the first time in 3 and a half years. I took mum with me because its well difficult to choose new frames when you are as blind as a bat as I am.

The whole experience didnt start out so well when the guy doing the pressure test couldnt get my eye centred and ended up puffing about 10 times in each eye. Then a young irish girl, who's accent I struggled to follow, did the actual eye test.

Now I have been perching specs on my nose since I was 11 so thats over 40 years worth of eye tests, so I do have some idea of how these things go. They do not normally start by taking my glasses away and then asking me to say what the letter is in the mirror. Not with my perscription anyway. She was a tad upset when I said all I could see was a very blurred white blobby square! Ok she said, lets try the hand chart. So she got the hand chart and held it up to the mirror ... and that helped how? It was no larger and no nearer.

She moved a foot towards me, nope, still a white blob .... with a few black blobs on it.

She got the idea.

She put the lens holding frames on and shoved in some lenses. Yeah why didnt we just start from here?

If I wasnt too sure of her then, I lost total confidence when she started to give me encouragement to read the smaller letters on the chart - 'you can do it, you know you can read them, have a guess, go on!' Err and if I guess, how exactly does that help you work out my perscription?

It took nearly an hour to do the half hour bank of tests, partly because I just couldnt get an ear for her accent and partly because she was doing everything by the book - as per the above. Finally she worked out that I did need new glasses - durh!

Then she did the health tests, she spent aaaaages shining the light in my eyes, getting really annoyed when I didnt look at the mirror (which her head was obscuring) . She changed to the 3D camera but by now my concentration was lagging. After about 15 mins of bright lights on my retina she said I needed new glasses and to follow her. Outside as if in after thought she said I needed to do one more test. Still partially blinded by all the torch light torture, she wanted me to watch for black lines round a dot to appear and push the button when they did. Err what lines. Nothing appeared as shown on the chart, there was a faint flashing but no black lines. Four times we tried the test but no, couldnt see them or didnt understand what I was looking for.

Next thing I know she is putting me down to be refered to my GP? What?? yep, wait three days, ring GP for appointment, she would be making an immediate recommendation by letter that evening.

So this morning I rang my GP surgery, but the letter hasnt turned up yet. So I continue to worry and to carry a box round to catch my eyes in when they fall out!

Garden photos are still in my camera so please be patient and I will soon update more.

password protected

The lack of blogging is due to the fact that somewhere along the line something strange has happened to my lappie and it now wont remember any passwords, and this little bear of no brain is finding it hard to remember them all too. Its becoming really annoying that every time I want to check my emails (many times a day) I have to not only log in but fill in the log in page too (yes it wont even do that for me any more). Anyway I have finally hit on a combo of password and user name that lets me back into google and can update on here!

There is a fair bit to update too. Later today I am going to go and take some photo's of my garden as in the last week it has been changing quite a bit and now is almost ready for the summer!

Last week Martin had a week off, I had to work on Monday and Tuesday which allowed him one day to escape to the golf club but the second day I got him to hire the carpet cleaner and give our carpets their half annual spruce. Its amazing how well they come up, and for a few weeks we are now taking off our shoes to walk on them and being more careful with coffees!

Then we attacked the garden together, Martin spiked and seeded the lawn, I started weeding the ivy from the flower beds and mulching them with bark. Photos to follow.

On Thursday it was so cold (how can this stupid weather change so much, Tuesday we had breakfast in the garden in our tee-shirt sleeves) that we turned on the central heating and hibenated indoors, but then Friday again better weather returned so we dug out our English Heritage Membership tickets and headed off to Downe to see Darwin's house and gardens.

I am beginning to hate google maps and am seriously considering sat nav! Nearly there, within touching distance and google lost us round the narrow country lanes of Orpington. Well it was pleasant countryside and we were not phased, until we met a white van driver wanting to pass, impatiently wanting to pass, pushing Martin and my little car into the hedge, scratching all my door panel. Hopefully its not so bad it wont t-cut out but I was not a happy bunny and had little recourse as it was me that insisted on taking my car and not Mart's.

Anyway eventually we found the place and very interesting and lovely it was too. EH are trying out new audio/visual hand sets. My advise to them is - dont bother. Audio on its own is fine as you cant watch the video's and look round but worse than that the machines keep freezing up, or sending you back to the beginning of the tour.

Attempting to work our audio/visual hand sets!

Worse still, Mr Computer Illiterate managed to come out of the tour and get into Windows where both of us were unable to reset but could happily access all the emails to admin!!!! We didn't, just had to walk all the way back to the reception and get it reset

The long walk back.

We weren't allowed to take photos inside the house but I took plenty of the gardens.

The greenhouses and kitchen garden where Darwin experimented on plants.

He had a whole greenhouse full of insect eating plants!

Darwin's formal garden where he observed the plants following the path of the sun from his front drawing room.



Apparenty Darwin's son was set the task of annually measuring how much the stone had sunk into the ground in order to proove a theory on earthworms. His son understood the importance of a long term study because he continued to take measurements for 17 years after Darwin died.

More updates to follow plus photos of garden. Watch this space.

Bad Bloger! Slap wrist.

And I dont really even have a good reason why as life has been pretty slow moving so there is no excuse about lack of time etc. Of course that does also mean lack of interesting stuff to blog about so I guess that is the reason

I have done some supply work - not alot though, but I did get invited to a new school to my repetoire which made a pleasant change. I have been out around the countryside with my mum and dad, not intentionally but a someone long drive for a lovely lunch, and I also got taken to the pub for another lovely lunch with Laura and Wayne so havnt lacked for outings or food! And I have been busy planting up seeds, both indoors and in my greenhouse, getting the beds ready for flowers and veg, and generally tidying up (or playing Nancy Drew adventure games!)

At the beginning of last week I jumped on the band wagon (and in the car) when Mum and Dad said they were off to the garden centre. We went to Ashford, and had a pleasant wander around Brybrooks, looking at the gift section and browsing the plants and seeds. Dad was after some dahlia tubers so we spent ages choosing those, and then mum spotted the jigsaws in the toy section. She saw one or two or maybe even three she really liked so I offered to buy it for her mother's day gift. Of course, worse than a child, she wanted to do it the moment she got home so I relented and let her have it early.

Wednesday, and Martin's day off, saw us both out in the garden giving it a helping hand shrugging off the winter coat and getting it ready for spring. The grass was finally starting to grow so Martin set to with the first mow of the year, whilst I busied myself in the greenhouse and in the flower beds.

Then Martin hacked down a particularly large tree shrub that had overgrown its space, which flooded light into the garden but upset the cat as it was his favourite climbing spot.

Friday, again Dad had itchy feet and wanted to go for a drive. With no idea in his head of where we were going, we headed off through Canterbury, down the Dover road, and into Folkstone. Mum and I thought we were stopping there, but he carried on driving, only stopping at Hythe so we could use the comfort facilities in Somerfield. Then with some small trouble finding the right road we continued along the Dymchurch road.

By now we had been in the car a couple of hours and were getting a tad peckish so Dad!!! suggested we go to the pub at Dungerness for lunch. Finding the right road did seem to be the theme for the day though as even that took some finding. We settled for the pub featured in Eastenders a while back,


it seemed quite popular as the car park was overflowing, but we found a table easily.

The fish and chips were superb (if not rather overpriced) and repleat from our meal, we got back in the car. Mum kept on 'moaning' that she had completed the two puzzles she had got on Tuesday and wanted to buy another so dad relented and we drove from Dungerness to Ashford (via a few more 'oh this isnt the right road after all' detours, leaving mum and I in fits of giggles) and yet another jjigsaw was purchased.

In all we were out for over 5 hours with only a short break for our yummy lunch, but it was a good laugh and Mum and Dad were on good form. Shame it didnt last though as by Saturday mum was laid up with a bad back and yesterday it was diagnosed as a kidney infection - poor my mummy.

In order to make up enough hours (and because it was stock take) Martin had to not only work Sunday but do a long day too. I think Laura felt a bit sorry for me so she offered to take me out to lunch on Sunday. They took me to the Red Lion in Hernhill (we used to go there for our school christmas staff do) where we spent three hours over a delish three course sunday roast, chatting and laughing. Thank you for inviting me guys I really enjoyed myself.

This week Martin is on holiday but so far I have been called into teach so he has been on his own with a long list of chores. Yesterday he hired the carpet cleaner and I now have wonderful, looking like new clean carpets!