Inside : a building.

Well for the first time this year I have used an old picture.. A church in Lille in France from our trip a couple of years ago...............

Back here ..Zac has just called, we had a lovely long chat with lots of plans for when he gets home and his last phase at college til late July.  It turns out he has 7 weeks before college and not the 5 he thought so we may get some fine weather and chill time..

I think the whole family is in need of some R&R. ..The grandchildren have had coughs and colds and sleep is at a premium at their house.. so the big girls are spending a day an night with us tomorrow. Zac coming home is always a nice excuse to get together and do..jot much x

Work continues to be busy, Colin had two days away seeing customers and his van tells him lots of statistics.. that he has driven 38,000 miles in 3 years..900 hours driving and that is the same as driving 24/7 for 5 weeks! 

I have had some nice orders in..even one from Libya for a fertiliser company..They even want to pay half up front so I am pleased with that..so often exports come to nothing after lots of thing and froing on emails!

..so I should take my leave and get to bed so Super Nannie mode can recharge for 9am!!
Have a good weekend x

365/286-7-8 Architecture-street scene-chimneys

 I always think of trips to France when I think of architecture. These are a couple of an amzing (hotel I think) copper clad building near Lille Central Station.. and then something more traditional in the town centre there..sun always helps!

 

A bit of a picture heavy post to catch up. It's been quite a nice weekend, I spent time at the local college yesterday with Kate, looking at different beauty courses and how the apprenticeship wrks as opposed to the diplomas. Luckily she seems to have made a good impression with the people who run the courses, they have been to her school and one of them is at the Pole Dancing class (!) so it's looking a little more sorted for next year, which makes me a little comfier... she doesn't seem desperate to do anything in particular but I think when she realises she is learning some sellable skills she will really get into it..

 

Today Col and I went over to St Ives, I have waxed lyrical about it before, whilst dissing 'my town' and it sure did deliver. Great shops, yeah a little posh and touristy but hey, if it works, don't knock it.. all open on a Sunday, great places to eat (especially Seafood Cafe... still so, so reliably wonderful!) and just a looked after feeling. 

So I took my street scenes there and as we travelled home I took a rare sky picture.. and there were chimneys too!

The last one is our own chimney..

365/265 Fruit

Busy blog today.. a few things to cover.. questions to answer...

1. What do we do?

Lynne asked me what our business is.. well we design & make handling equipment. It is probably dreary unless it is your 'thing' but we have been doing it twelve years and it is treating up pretty well (now). We started when Col was looking for a 'not-influenced-by-the-weather' alternative to civil engineering dive works. We met a super guy who held a patent on a trolley mechanism, and to cut a long story very short, we created a company with him and developed the patent application to apply to lifting heavy drums. 

At first Colin was chief sales / development / promo, everything and I was the paperwork behind the scenes girl!  Our first outing was at the Tomorrow's World Live show and we won a prize for innovation to avoid back injury.  The following year we had taken the product further and Colin won their Inventor of the Year show award.. awwwhh. Henry, the original patent holder was at this point 85 and was delighted to see the growth of his idea and evolution of the ideas. He died just last year and we still have letters from him saying how much he enjoyed being part of it with us, though to be fair it was quite an arduos expensive journey at times!

12 years later we now have a designer partner who is also one of our oldest friends, employ 14 people and manufacture a whole range of handling solutions for rolls, drums, doors, all kind of things.. and because we supply kit which meets all the awful H&S regs we sell to big food, drug, chemical companies, hardly anyone close to home really.  Hence Colin's draining trips up country, it is not easy being based in Cornwall, not really the centre of the world for manufacturing but hey, we get boat and dolphin days and all our family is here. 

You can see more stuff at www.sts-trolleys.co.uk It is a bit of a 'we-job', our daughters do the video editing, the website and stuff and our sons get involved with some of the workshoop stuff when time allows. Oh and I make lots of tea!  It really suits us as you can be home and at work at the same time, I even have a washing machine in the office kitchen (for overalls of course) and so can be found folding shirts thgouh the day just after I have answered the phone to someone in the MOD!

Hopefully that gives you a little taste of our lives and Lynne you can see how amazing it must have been for Zac to find one of our trolleys in the engine room of a cruise ship in Oz xx

2.  22.45 update.. (yes, teen taxi again tonight, but everyone is chatting with Zac, his last night so he will be up late playing X box later with our SiL too!..)

 ..well my Samsung tablet updated yesterday and now I can't do a thing with it! (remember the washed my hair and can't do a thing with it phrase!)  I feel like Anne now.. I have had to change the keyboard properties and now I am trying to upload some pics to this blog and it is on standstill!  It won't even upload a picture I know it uploaded before..bah!
I had some nice pics of the new layout I have done for the latest Happy Scrapper challenge, but no luck.. tomorrow I will transfer to this pc and do it the old way.. I still prefer a keyboard to tablet etc but it is great technology!

3. And so to fruit.. I should have photographed the girls today. I had Lyla come food shopping and then we got Lilly from school.   Lyla loves food and fruit especially.. in the few hours I had her she ate grapes, strawberries, raspberries and banana!  Lilly is doing great at school but it's long days. She does the mornings for academic stuff and it seems a shame to bring her home to miss cooking or playing activities..

Well my picture may have been here before it was taken in France, I love their pastries..

365/195 Flowers

.. always happy to have a nice easy prompt.. when the girls were here last weekend I enjoyed telling Lilly the names of some of the flowers. I didn't really realise how much I knew from my Mum, and it is lovely to hear Lilly in turn remembering them.

Last year I had a sorry little piece of flower bed and in it we planted hydrangeas, now they are decent size and even disguise the grasses amongst them!



Hebe!



Pops has planted a few petunias and the fuschias are coming through, Col still uses the area for cutting wood for the decking but one year when he is done I plan to have lots of lobelia and mesembrinthemums all down the wall. 

There's Lilly by the flower bed, she got her wellies good and muddy and I just stopped her trapsing indoors in full flow.  Her favourite flower was the Hebe.. or Phoebe as she liked to call it.. they remind me of when I was a child, we used to pick the leaves and press them to open them up!

Finally from my library of pictures some playground inspired flowers from a railway station open space in Lille the other day... was it only two weeks ago we were there!?

@ Lille Railway Station

365/183 Grumpy

mmm, writing this a couple of days late but did have the word in mind on Sunday and should have a few pictures to illustrate..we had a nice day that day really, 1st July ..we left our lovely Holiday Inn in Lille and headed for Arras where I had read of a monument to the lost men of the Battle of the Somme. Colin is an avid watcher of most things wartime and I also wanted to see one of the cemeteries for myself.

 When we arrived the road was cordoned off as there was a music festival close by, so as we walked up the road, the oldest swingers in Arras, it was about the same time that Kate was queueing for T4 on the Beach at wet (grumpy?) Weston-super-Mare!




..one of twelve or more lstings of names

 

Well the Memorial was huge, listing the names of almost 36,000 men who lost their lives in 1916/7 at Arras.  It looked as if it had been recently cleaned and I wondered how many more cleanings the names would survive as some were fading almost into the stone..Panel after panel of names, so poignant, so similar a feeling to the Vietnam memorial we visited in Washington years ago, every name a son.

 




Detail..

 

..the upkeep of the memorial and the cemetery behind is fantastic and this was a fairly small one I understand.. I have included this written panel as it details the events at Arras and the unbelievable numbers of men lost... the life expectancy of a pilot in 'bloody' April 1917 fell from three weeks to 17 and a half hours..

So... no reason to be grumpy in our 21st century comfort , given a nudge as to the lives lived almost a hundred years ago..

..so we headed north to Calais and our ferry home.  Sadly we had a two hour wait and then a cold ferry with minimal services available (we had to be loaded as freight being a large van and there were no tourist facilities open.. )..

.. the view to Dover wasn't very happy and then the drive to Sevenoaks for a lacklustre hotel doesn't take long to feel a grump coming on.. and when internet costs at £16 a day (vs free in the same brand hotel across the Channel) and I can't get blogging..bah humbug..

... xxx

365/182 Gothic

.. To be sure I even looked this up.. sitting in a square beside a fountain in the twon centre of Lille.. the definition was very specific, architecture / French etc etc.. so all I had to do was look around!  We also went into  large church in the town, St Maurice, there were some amazingly Gothic looking parts to photograph.. and so many confession boxes, we smiled a lot as we reckon we would both be in there a long time if we had to confess all our 'sins'!!

I have also taken a bunch of other nice photos but I am saving some of them for a barren day when all I see is the inside of our office!

365/181 Silhouette

We spent the day .. well half of it.. eating!  We got up late-ish, breakfast (and Col is a recent convert to chocolate croissants) and then to see the guys again, but with a barbecue lunch for one of their birthdays.. it was good to show them our kit and talk more about business but we were back at hotel with a bottle of wine in the sun by 4.30 and hurrah for being an hour ahead, it stays warmer later!


ooops. didn't notice my finger there!



Needless to say my blog words may be somewhat slurred and Col is resting his eyes on a lounger by the pool.. it's a hard life but someone has to do it...

365/180 Free choice.. and no cooking..

.. to be fair these are the croissants I ate as we left home on Wednesday but they reflect that we are 'in France' ... ferry crossing was uneventful, baring that I hated having to walk between huge lorries in the car deck as we were classed as 'freight'being in a big van..

..we spent the day Thursday travelling over and then down to Lille to meet our French resellers and a new one from Belgium too.. it promised to rain but in fact never did, but was soooo hot, and Col works so hard explaining stuff and being so positive with these guys!  the day ended late with a fab meal at our Holiday Inn and a super comfy bed to boot.. just what we ordered after the tired sloping bed from the night before!!