Pretty as a picture
Do you remember me raving enthusiastically about the photo shoot my sister bought me for my 30th birthday? Well, she picked them up from the studio yesterday morning and gave them to me today over lunch … so here are a few of my favourites from the shoot to satisfy your curiosity. /
Defying Gravity
I downloaded the Glee Album last night (I’m an unashamed Gleek. Don’t judge me), and have been playing it incessantly since and is often the way with songs and lyrics, there was one particular song that mentally attached itself to my subconscious and found me identifying hugely with the lyrics: Defying Gravity from the musical [...]
Mother’s Day … I wonder?
I’ve been in two minds whether to blog about this. Truth be told, I’m still not sure so I’m typing word by word with no idea if I’ll hit publish at the end of this or not. Unless you’ve had your head buried in the sand recently, you couldn’t have missed the fact that it’s [...]
Exceptional People Hide In The Most Unlikely Places
Yesterday afternoon, I found myself in a pub in Wolverhampton, celebrating a friend’s birthday with a couple of old friends, and was absolutely STRUCK by how EXCEPTIONAL they are. Looking at our table of laughing, joking, gesticulating you wouldn’t have seen anything out of the ordinary, just a group of fun, happy, well balanced people. [...]
When I grow up, I want to rule the world…
I can’t really deny bring a grown-up for much longer, despite my enduring fantasy that I am four years old and have been for the last 26 years. The evidence is beginning to mount up. The stripes of grey hair winging their way out from my temples, the lines fanning out from my eyes when [...]
Working it out
This morning, I was woken by a wet nose in my ear as my dog decided it was time for me to wake up, and I’d been lying in for far too long and I found myself springing out of bed like a gazelle. Not, for once, for fear of what the dogs would do [...]
Friends & Furniture
I’ve spent the last few days feeling very up in their air and not myself at all. I’ve felt reckless and constantly on the edge of doing something unusual. My sleep patterns even went a little awry, and with a day off today, it clearly culminated in my failsafe solution to all emotional troubles. Yep, [...]
In a Nutshell
It’s been a turbulent and interesting year, 2009. It fairly kicked the ass of 2008, 2007, 2006 and indeed 2005 but deviated from the finishing line at the end of it … but to recap, here’s my 2009 in all its homemaking glory: January I took a big step and moved away from the area [...]
Seasonal Insanity
My lovely sister left our post-Christmas celebrations this afternoon, and the house is obscenely quiet. I keep expecting to hear an unlikely crash, thud or squeak as a reminder that I’m not crashing about alone in the cottage. Instead the silence is tomb-like and oddly magnified. There may as well be a giant neon sign [...]
Dog Days
Gosh, it’s been a busy few days. I’ve had friends and dogs over, and been enjoying the house and the wild and windy weather outside. There are few things in life more invigorating and refreshing than wandering outside in the wild winter weather, with dogs that get excited at every small thing you see. I [...]
Extreme Christmas
I think Christmas brings out the extreme in people. Year after year, we’re told to strive for the ‘perfect Christmas’ with articles from various magazines on decorating and preparing puddings and organising your turkeys in October until we start planning from August for fear of getting something wrong or missing something out. It becomes a [...]
The Street Where I Live
God, the weather today has just been gorgeous. Genuinely, you could be mistaken, looking at the picture to the left of my road in thinking it was a summer’s day (yup, the gorgeous picturesque landscape in the photo … I live there! Never ceases to amaze me either.) Wandered up past the farm opposite down [...]
A Raft Called Mediocrity
It’s an easy thing to find yourself stuck in a rut, doing something that you’re not sure you want to do or doing something that you’re good at but have no real passion for. It’s easier still to settle in and convince yourself that it’s what you want really and it’s far too late to [...]
A weekend away
Well, woo-hoo, I have a weekend off! I’ll warn you in advance not to expect so very much from me for the next few days as my sister is coming down to Somerset for a flying visit and we have lots of out and abouts planned. It’s a funny sort of thing, but every time [...]
Courage is not knowing enough to be scared
Sometimes, when the sh*t hits the fan, all you can do is power on through it until you come out the other side. People, quite often, wonder how you got through it and fill you chock full of compliments on your bravery and courage but the truth is quite often less glamorous. A while ago [...]
Getting to know you, getting to know me.
Welcome to my blog. I used to have another blog but it’s encountering possibly unsolvable technical difficulties and is skulking around in cyberspacelike a particularly defiant teenager, abandoned but not unloved. If I ever get my hands on it, I shall transfer some of it over here and this will no longer be the first [...]
Budgeting is a creative pursuit…
This post was rather inpired by Lauren, over at A Typical Atypical, who recently blogged about money and budgeting in her Rags to Riches post. It’s a subject near and dear to my heart, as I’m sure the world and its wife knows1 by now, but Lauren’s post inspired me to look at it from [...]
Hitting the Bottle …
An acquaintance popped round earlier on this week, bearing as a gift, a bottle of plonk, which has rather inspired the musings for this post. Contrary to its title, this post is less about drinking and more about abstinence, for I personally am not a big drinker. To those who knew me at University, this [...]
It wasn't me … little green men came down from space and did it. Honest.
A word in your ear, dear readers? Thanking you kindly. It has recently come to my attention, that I am at last becoming a grown up, or a least that is how I appear to my contemporaries and the public at large. We’ll perhaps adress my inner workings another time. There are certain characteristics that [...]