Out to the west'ard

It was my Dad's birthday a couple of weeks ago and his anniversary on wednesday so JB, Col & I went out to St Levan with some flowers, always a great journey, whether rain or shine, and the windy weather had whipped up some great waves out off Porthcurno.

On the way home, just past Treen Corner we stopped for some violets, I brought them home and Jordan took some photos of them before I bunched them up.  I asked her to reach up and get me a vase from the top shelf and she produced and old marmalade jar, just like the ones we used to water the violets when I was young, before we bunched and boxed them ready for posting to Covent Garden. 

An ugly old marmalade jar you would normally find tossed in the rubbish corner of an old field, but heavenly nostalgic to me.

Takes all kinds..

Living with a leggy teenager..

Late morning today and I was having a quiet coffee whilst waiting to take the girls to town. Kate had an acrobatics class and was getting ready (that generally means a protracted episode with make up, hair straighteners and a number of household mirrors)

As she was cleaning her teeth I heard a bump...now in our house, that's a common occurence.. Jordan has been known to fall up and down stairs and once tried to take the door frame into the room with her...Ross for his sins managed to break a newly installed stair gate the first time he tried to vault over it...

...'You okay Kate?' I asked.

'Yes, it was my toe...' ...'on the ceiling'

That's 'Life with Kate.'

What do you do after tea?

..We were sitting in our kitchen after a large plateful of sausage and mash, with lots of veg, just thinking how nice it would be to eat that syrup pudding Jordan had her eye on... just not for an hour or two.. after we'd lain down a bit and recovered..

..and what did Kate do?.. proceed to show me her latest tricks from acrobatics!  Out came my excuse for a 'camera' phone, though it should be banned under the trade descriptions act... surely a camera takes the picture in a nano-second..'as it happens'..oh no, not this one.. as an example, here's the first picture I took..

..but then I caught a headstand..

Trying something new..

Yesterday JB and I went to buy her some more sticky backed velvet paper for the board game she is designing and making for Graphics at school. She has chosen a race & chase game similar to Cluedo and has worked really hard creating the rooms and characters, lots of computer time and patience on her part.

The paper came from the Crafty Corner in town and while I was there I succombed to these great marker pens, like felt pens but they don't show the marks when you fill in and double layers make great shadows etc.

I fell in love with a summer beach stamp and though that  might enjoy a bit of grown up colouring in while I watch TV, and it would all be towards a scrap layout (or maybe even a card?!!), but for once it wouldn't require me to either hole it up in my scrap room or bring all my stuff into the kitchen.

So... I spent a while practicing my stamping and (wishing I had a larger acrylic block) eventually got a stamp I was happy enough with to tint. .. a little better stamping and who knows, I might make a card maker of sorts!

I'm off to try the happiness stamp in the top pic now..

Empty nest?

Well it happened yesterday.. sure it was only for a few hours, but just a little taster of what life just might be like in five or six years time!

Ross in London, Zac at work, JB and Kate out pals and Pops on some social or another, notching up a few cups of tea and a few more cakes with his pals.  I got home from playing taxi and we had tuna and monkfish with fresh bread for our lunch, read a bit and watched some TV til Pops came in to say hi and rescue us from each other!

No seriously it was great, relaxing and quite comfy. It's odd though, as you know it's not for long and you have to fight the urge to 'do something' just to utilise the time valuably, so we just rested and will wait a few more years til it's a bit longer time and maybe we could even plan to have friends over to eat or something, before the door clicks and you hear keys on the table!

End of the week..

..and Col arrived home weary but laden with all the things to make the weekend start right there, on Friday afternoon!  Almost everyone was out so only us two, Pops and JB had tea together, and we had all the treats.. Dominos Pizza and,.. direct from the USA, well via a Motorway Services.. a Krispy Kreme donut selection!  Not since Will Krupka bought us some way back in 1999/ 2000 have we had them here!

Kate managed to take 3 along to her take-away evening with her mates and we enjoyed the rest.. I think the choc dipped with custard centre was my favourite.

How come the yumyums our local bakery offer as a similar treat just can't quite repeat the wonders of the KK coatings?

Lots of mmm's and ahhh's later I observed that the few left in the box would not go uneaten if Colin's mum were still here.. Ken and I agreed how she would have loved trying the sweet creamy things and was always going to 'stop eating cream teas' this week. 
 Then, as we closed the box, Ken suggested she may still have a hand in things that go on here.. the donuts have been made since 1937, the year she was born... we liked that!

Catch up.

It's been a hectic few days, seeing lots of people and doing things a bit differently and it all makes for an interesting time.. oh and pretty tiring! The kids are all headed towards half term and I think we're all a little weary, but hopefully we'll all enjoy the change.

Ross is off to London for the weekend with a group from his school, and that's going really well.   Zac is busy working at paintball and is doing most of the donkey work in revamping our office as we have a new design guy join us on Monday, and of course the whole family is looking forward to the arrival of our new baby early in March.

There's plenty of dates to remember in March, Kate has a birthday and I have an anniversary for my Dad, and remember too he'd have been 89 yesterday.. hard to imagine when he only just made 47, to think of him as an elderly chap, but no doubt Penberth would have still been his 'city' and I wonder where we would have all ended up if things hadn't happened the way they did.

(I was just looking for a photo to add in here and this is one of my favourite, Dad running the old winch which was used before they built the proper winch-house at Penberth. digi photos are so good, the bigger you make them the more you discover, like the big grin on his face. I think I like this one because he looks so well, healthy and enjoying life, as know I know that a lot of the time he must have felt pretty weary and getting through the day was sometimes quite an effort)

I saw two of my scrapbooking buddies (kids terms) yesterday and had a great lunch, followed by some great natter, comparing family notes and angles... then later a quick outing to the local hospital, but Yvonne is looking good and her humour is contagious!  Hoping we can all make 12th March at Tregenna, we have reserved the Naughty Corner from Linda, but we'll be sure to behave...one of the themes is New Beginnings and I'm sure to have a big choice.. will it be business, babies or (think of another'B' ..quick)...err..books?!

It was good to have a change from routine and I've also seem quite a bit of Lilly, such a personality! Good though, to vary the routine, I was even in the office at 8am today to get ahead.. and that's not common!

Kids say the funniest things..

Yesterday we had the onslaught otherwise known as Lilly! She is so busy, luckily whilst with her, she seems to create energy in me.. but when she's gone...well, the usual grandparent recovery thing!

As we walked across the yard we met one of the guys from our workshop, 'Look, here's Maurice' I said..and Lilly promptly ran up to him professing 'I've really missed you, Maurice'  Maurice and I looked somewhat surprised and bemused as she has probably only seen him once or twice before, but she sure was definite about how much she'd missed him.

As we left Maurice to go back into the house, along came Joey, Lisa's cat, twelve years old and the fat cat of our yard (he ran two tiny kittens out of town a couple of years back, despite him being spayed and also them being Queen kitties!)   'Ahh, here's Joey' I said.  To which Lilly added...'hello Joey, I've really really missed you...'

Kind of put her greeting to Maurice in perspective!

In the evening we went to see Sanctum, a James Cameron film (he of Aliens, Titanic and Avatar fame) in 3D.   Interesting, and good first 3D film to see, especially if you're not a big animation fan.  I think the story was slightly predictable and not very deep but the underwater scenes and some of the 'look-away-now' kind of moments were really good.  (Even in the opinion of our resident underwater expert.. xx)

Dear Heart..

Thanks to Linda I have some decent pics of the layouts I did at Newlyn Just Scrapbooking last weekend.  It was our third birthday and we had an extra long session and ended up eating out at the Dolphin in Penzance... and a good time was had by all.

Of course, Valentine's Day is approaching and hearts and things were the order of the day.  I took along a folder full of photos but had no real plans, but these layouts were the end result and I was pretty pleased with them.  The underlying idea was to create layouts with two sheets of the same paper, one altered with inks, stamps etc.  Linda added another element for each of us so I had to also use buttons (yes) and bows (no, sorry) and use paper from her scrap box (yes, but she told me afterwards it wasn't meant to be in her scrap box... you see, I have an eye for a tasty piece!)

Complete raves from the grave.. the first shows my Col with an all over tan.. not to be missed, a bit like an eclipse, will be unlikely to happen again in my lifetime!  He was working on a shipwreck project in the Maldives back in 1989 or 90, (way back when anyways), and as engineer he had to keep things running.  Many a night he woke in a hot house sweat as the generator had failed and the air conditioning on the boat had stopped! 

Good news though as this is what led us to the Maldives again for our first holiday in 2004, and I guess you could say it kind of changed our lives..

The second picture was taken on New Year's Eve 1998, we had a party in our workshops (Zac spotted the grinding discs in the background), it had been a busy year and whilst Col may look very romantic with his eyes shut, I actually think he was really weary and making a wish for an easier year to come! 

Busy, busy!

So much going on and then add some more, but I love it!  Colin has been all over the country again, customer calls and training. Last evening I was just contemplating a lazy tea and an evening sorting some scrap stash for Saturday's long day, when my brother turned up unexpected.  We keep in touch but only catch up every few months and we were kind of 'overdue'.

As usual we had a couple of drinks, gassed away, laughed, reminisced, got off the subject, went around the houses and back to the matter in hand again.... yes, we are quite alike in some ways!  And it was lovely too to see some of his expressions and realising just how much I could see my mum in him....Jordan agreed and it was a nice feeling. Even living our childhoods a decade apart we seem to have memories of similar events, people and the things we had in our house.

Today new life was the order of the day and we went to see a scan of my nearly new grandchild.  I had Lilly on my knee and she was sure it was a frog she could see on the scan, but we didn't reckon we'd be able to decide on boy or girl, and didn't want to either.  All's well, a tiny baby almost 5 pounds at the moment, but hopefully that's good for mum too next month. 

Catching up on office work, making tea and ironing since I got home.... so now I have some blog time.. even the 9-5 is manic at the minute so I'm having to blog out of office hours, how good am I!! (good job I'm the boss)

Oh and this is such a good story.. Lilly calls Colin 'Big Pops' (and his dad 'Little Pops')  As she went past the Mitchell windmills the other day, they were not working, she told Lisa that the windmills were broken and 'call Big Pops to mend them'  Looks like at 2 and a half she knows who Mr Fix-It is around here.