My flexible friend!

After we'd finished taking photos Kate was practising some of her acro moves...just waiting now for Jordan to photoshop in a more interesting background.. Eiffel Tower maybe!

Kate!

Kate, and more Kate!

My pal from scrapbooking wanted to work on some people pics so Kate was first to volunteer..we got together yesterday and here's a few of my favourites...

...this one is so cool, love Jordan's altered-art trilby and that hair!

We laughed when Kate donned this welder's cap in the workshop, but you know how sometimes things just work!

Certainly looked better on Kate than any of our welder guys!

First catch of the year!

Not sure what I'm going to do this year with the fishing pictures, they all seem the same as last year's, but short of putting everyone in fancy dress of catching sharks out of red sea there's not much scope for variation.

Even so, this was our first catch of 2010!

'Ok, Fish..

..it's Kate and I'm back..'
This was her greeting to the fish stocks as we arrived on the Runnelstone yesterday teatime!

The weather was great, sunny and warm, until we came back home about 7pm, getting cooler then.  Not much luck with the fish though, Si and Col got a couple of nice pollock, Kate was getting frustrated at this point, wondering if she had lost her 'lure' (in fishing joke!)
But we hung around near some guys who knew what they were doing and gave her some feathers, sure enough ten minutes later we had a few mackeral on board. 

As for me, I kind of like just being out there, I laid back in the shelter of the boat, sun in my face and the blue sky in my mind...

...on the way home we passed by some traditional fishing boats like my Dad would have had (and here I have to say, his was a nice wooden punt rather than GRP fibreglass, by the way... and clinker built would have been my memory of choice, but alas his wasn't....I have to be honest here!) 

It made me think about how many hours, days, weeks, months, years even he must have spent out there, along with the guys from the cove; work, rest and play all based around the same mile of coastline...the same mile of coastline which makes me feel I belong (ala 'if I were a salmon')

I was wondering how much those fabulous granite cliffs might have changed in the 50 years since then...not much I guess, and little more in the hundreds of years Penberth has been a fishing cove.   We passed by the boats, quite close, men working, comfy in their surroundings, second nature to them, ... and it felt like maybe.. just maybe.. we were in a time loop...where this could have just been 1960's instead...and maybe I could reach out and touch...

Back to boating..

.. tomorrow we hope! .................Well there's no point in living in the best bit of the UK / world*  and not being able to leave work early on a summer day to go fishing / boating / do-nutting* is there?

(*delete as appropriate)

And we need to order a new camera too, managed to take two  shockproof, waterproof cameras on holiday and came back with two flooded, useless ones.. but they had done their duty..love 'em.

Summer was in May this year.

Great weekend ! .. true Brits, always talking about the weather.  But it was!

And we've (well, for 'we' read Colin & Zac) have been pretty organised ahead of time; the grass has been cut, trees trimmed back and generally tidied. For my bit I have made sure the fridge is stocked with plenty of beer and bits for the barbecue! We managed to eat out of doors three times over the weekend and had strawberries twice.. quite high results on the summer-ometer I'd say.

Had a really cute moment too: Kate doing some of her acro stunts and little Lilly tried to copy by bending over like she was going to roly-poly... ahhh...but, true to form , never working with children or animals, she wouldn't perform for camera and ran off to the trampolene instead!

Restoring my faith..

... in teenage offspring.. you know how sometimes you wonder if you'll ever have really meaningful sharing times again... and then they do something to make your heart all mush again?

Well Sunday was a lazy but doing day around the house.. Kate was the busiest bee really, she quietly got on with cleaning two fish tanks and a nice job she did too.(even though I could tell she really wished she was somewhere else, ..with someone else.. well, anyone else but us really!..she doesn't say so, but it was a Sunday and even I can remember the monoteny of the adults 'lazy Sundays' when I was a teenager, full of some angst or another)

Evening came and went, it was bedtime, all saying goodnight, checking things turned off.. I opened the oven to put some trays away... and her face lit up, like a small child at Christmas.. yes, I'd made rice pudding.. and it was still warm, perfect comfort food for teenage angst.... she was my baby and I was a hero again!

Lethargy and a 'night out'

What is it that makes us all so lethargic some days?

..is it the fact that it is only Tuesday? ...or that we slept too heavily and woke feeling like our arms are lead weights and that we did three rounds with someone it would not be fun to do three rounds with?... or is it that we can see the lighter evenings coming, and with them the feeling that we should be using the extra daylight usefully, rather than languishing with a glass or two of the nice stuff in front of the fire each evening? .. or is it cos I'm trying to read/ digest/modify a Quality Manual...now that IS the definition of lethargy inducing behaviour!

Whatever the cause, it has got me today, and not just me.. but Ross and Col as well.. at least.
Not even a walk down the field at lunchtime, with my man and the dog managed to bring me enough sunlight exposure to eradicate this weary, so we can rule out SAD syndrome! (or maybe we need to lay in the sun and have it focus specifically at the back of our necks.. did I read that somewhere?)..

.. anyway, I have been promised a night out tonight (since Sunday.. if we can both muster up the energy / enthusiasm!),.. and boy, our Col knows how to treat a girl...Seafood Cafe in St Ives I wondered??... or maybe the cinema in Truro (not Penzance, the carpet  stick to your feet and the seats spew foam from the arms like candyfloss.. yukkk)

Nah, you all know him better than that.. it's Tuesday, BOGOF night at Domino's.... I did smile, I will love it, and who knows it may even be nice enough to have a wander in Falmouth too.. and better than that he knows that I know that the perks will be bringing home the 'One Frees' so I don't have to make lunch for the masses tomorrow!

Easily pleased, that's me...

Bring out the gingham pinafore..

.. may be last night's talk of Cydrax and Clarnico Mints, but today I felt the need to reacquaint myself with the domestic goddess in me.. well, the Cornish Mom anyways.

So, I've been baking this morning, a nice sponge sandwich now filled with strawberry jam, a Devon Apple Cake (ala Crank's Kitchen cookbook, now a family favourite) and a dozen scones...Col and the boys came in from the fields (not hay making, that'd be just too twee, but from putting up some fencing panels), had some sandwiches and then feasted on the scones.. not my best, but who cares when the jam & cream get added.

Just a further note on the Cydrax..this quote from a review on Amazon...

There are sparkling apple drinks and then there is Cydrax....

Apparently it is still made under licence in Trinidad & Tobago where it is even used to toast the bride & groom at weddings and they have kind of adopted it as their own.

Funny thing branding isn't it.. Jordan is doing a media piece on the different advertising angles used by Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream (uses milk from the small farmer) and by Green & Black's (taking an organic slant). We talked about the target audience and out of interest we looked up the parent companies of the two ice creams.. oh yeah, the multi-nationals.. the two are owned by Unilever and Cadbury's respectively...no doubt they are funding the clever advertising which attempts to make us believe the uniqueness is still intact...you decide.

What happened to my mints!

As anyone who knows me would expect, I can even get nostalgic about sweets!

Well maybe it was my Mum who made me that way, telling me how Clarnico Mints were my Dad's favourites...but I do remember them having a specialness about them when I was a kid, alongside the Cydrax ( a forerunner of Appletise, appley but not so sweet if I recall, in a brown bottle with a cork stopper.....stored in the cool dark pantry under the stairs..)... as Dad had kidney problems and it made him feel sickly and tired quite a bit he used to take the mint, break it into pieces in the wrapper and have a little bit now and then to ease the nausea...I guess the Cydrax served similar purpose.

But I digress.. Every now and then when I have a weak moment when I buy a hoard of sweets or chocolate for the masses, the Clarnico mints..my mints...my Dad's mints ...catch my eye...so I buy some..

On arrival home the kids spy them too, Ross alerts Zac, he has spotted them in the cooking shelf (well an attempt to hide from myself really.. how often do I get to explore the cooking shelf!)  I allow them one each, and one for me...and two weeks later I find them again.. but there are only 4 or 5 left.. haha, who has eaten Mum's mints!!! So I gave one to Lilly, one for me... and the last 3 in a new hidey place.. no, sod it, I'll eat them.. then no-one can steal my last one..

And so it will go on, my thrice yearly foray into my sweet nostalgia..

Pop-up Cards!

Its's been a good few years since I was selling Usborne Books at Home and encountered the Pop-Up cards book they published.  Mmm, two kids and some time to kill, I churned out a number of can-can pop-up cards with such things as Can-can Pigs in lace doiley skirts and Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles can-canning inside Ross' card!  True, I needed rescuing from an existence where there was time and an inclination to make (or least of all buy the materials for) felt parrots.. thanks Col! 

So .... I wasn't sure how keen I was to make the 3D / pop-up layouts Linda had planned for us last week at Just Scrapbooking. But I had the perfect card to make and here it is.... dear son-in-law has been known to yawn a little at my scrapbooking habit, (though never when he or his babes are the subject I notice)... so his 30th birthday card became a token of my 'touchee' approach.. his loves of 'yawn' paintball... yes, we yawn just as much when Zac launches into paintball debate, perhaps that's why he has got the hypnotism bug, so he can use the paintball talk to set us in the initial trance eh?!

This is the outside of the layout..note the continued use of eyelets Linda, have a huge stock and challenge for the year is to incorporate on every layout perhaps?  Thanks Yvonne for the green swirl and the inside letters.. me and Yvonne have a nice symbiosis going on the last couple of scraps, we always seem to have just what the other needs.. well I hope she feels its mutual..

Here's the inside.. the stamped-on look of the inner paper was a real find and I couldn't resist using more of the 'paintball' beads I'd got for Zac's layout last autumn.

Hope your 30th was Happy Tom!

Teenagers eh..

So, let me pose a question.. if you left your teenage son and daughter, aged 17 and 15 respectively, home alone one evening, what would you expect to hear they had been doing when you got home?

• Wild party?
• Sneaky eating of all the chocolate in the house (which amounts to a jar of chocolate spread at the minute!)
• Had girl / boyfriends over for illicit meeting?
• Watching not so savoury TV?
• Drinking all the beer?
• Taken over the local branch of UKIP?

Well maybe so.. but that's not what happened at my house last night.... I got in to hear that Zac has joined some Teenage Hypnotism Society and had been practicing on Jordan, had got as far as getting her to lift one arm as soon as she came 'round (well it was meant to be two arms but maybe she was only half under the influence?)

All I know is that I wouldn't have guessed that as being on the list!

So good...

... to hear Colin laugh out loud when he is away on a trip.... there are so many dull moments and hours spent driving from one customer to another or 'treading water' overnight in another bland Travel Inn that he often sounds really tired and bored.  So it's really nice to hear him laugh, even more so when the joke is at my expense, I feel like I've done my bit to keep his spirits up.

Last evening I had a catch up with my crazy Polish girlfriend from the next village, this is at least the third time in 6 months we've managed to co-ordinate some us-time so we're on a roll! She is a coffee addict and driving so was on the large cappucinos, and I plumped for the medium white wine.. oh dear, what a lightweight.. two large glasses and I was anyone's.. well, metaphorically!  Animated catch up was the order of the day and laughter proved the perfect medicine for midweek tedium.

I was relating the story to Col when I got home, told him that we dipped out on food as it was too late, so I bought a bag of crisps expecting that she would share with me...'No, you eat them', she said, 'I only wanted food so you would be eating and I'd have chance to talk...'

.. now does that sound like me?? I can still here him laughing...poor thing, he still can't believe that it's only 5 weeks since we got back from our holiday.. a sweet distant memory...

Paris Jones!

Not sure how this will read if you aren't familiar with our Kate, but suffice to say she is a typical 13 year old, loves clothes, shopping, her girlie pals and her hair!  She likes to play the blonde card and hey, if it works, good luck to her.. there'll be plenty of years where she'll have to fend for herself I guess!

Yesterday evening everyone was put to work getting out office & workshops ready for a customer visit.  Col uses it as a way of getting painting / cleaning/ refurbishment done as otherwise we get the mañana mood.  Jordan took charge of the office and Kate took so long getting herself changed that she copped for the grim job.. cleaning the toilets!

Two layers of latex gloves and plenty of bleach later she came back into the house...'a human being should not have to do that job' she sighed..' I felt like Paris Hilton on the Simple Life'

... need we say more, she is so funny! Spent the rest of the evening talking about Jones Towers (as in the Hilton) and how 'Daddy would have to help her with that..'

Altered images..

Jordan has been having a real fun time with her camera lately, she's a member of a site called deviantart and is inspired by lots of the altered images she sees on there. 
Add to that a younger sister with designs on a modelling career and we have the potential for much creativity in the house..

Last evening Jordan had Kate wear some distressed (to say the least) fishnets and her (JB's) Converse shoes, and sit in her bedroom window..good start for Kate who decided the shoes were so uncool and that they made her feet look big..but she passed the first model test, that you wear and do as the 'creative director' wishes!!

A bit later, PhotoShop allowing, this is our new screen saver on the house PC.. so cool!

And in my dreams too... to wake up and see the sea from my bedroom window.. that's actually, I have decided, all I want for my old age, so that shouldn't be too dificult should it...mind you with house prices and the economy the way they are it may involve lots more years work and some house hunting  before I get there. 

Daft really as we live only 5 miles from sea on all coasts, but having lived probably less than 100 yards from the sea for all my formative years, it's just something I want in the future.