MAY Travel

APRIL Colours in my life

March - CELEBRATE

The Topic for March was Celebrate, how fortunate I was to have Mothering sunday, a glorious Spring and several birthdays and a holiday in Anglesey with friends to celebrate!

I'm afraid I still have to finish the LO for Feb and do any IRL pages for March but at least you can see my collages LOL!!

MOTHERING SUNDAY

MATT AND SARA'S BIRTHDAY

AMIE'S BIRTHDAY

PETER'S BIRTHDAY

SPRING

JOHN'S BIRTHDAY

HOLIDAY ANGLESEY

7 Other loves in my Life

What are my other loves apart from God and DH?
Our cats
My home
My bed
Holidays
Snow
TV
Reading
My Computer
and of course SHOES

6 Love of Scrapping

Of course this had to be included in my loves! What a wonderful hobby I discovered on retiring 4 years ago! It keeps my brain active, learning new things weekly and meeting and making lots of new friends. My family and non scrapping friends think I am obsessed!!
The best thing I have ever done since starting scraping was the 365 challenge in 2008. I have a group of wonderful ladies who I share and trust, laugh and cry with and we will be having our 2nd reunion in June for 3 nights!

5 Love of my Family and Friends

I just love people but especially my wonderful DH Peter, our family and close friends. Here are some photos of Peter, our 4 grown up children and other halves and our 5 grandchildren and friends

4 Love of Shopping?

Do I really love shopping? Well this week and every week I HAVE to shop for food and really find it quite boring these days and such a chore, especially the number of times you pick up and put an item on the checkout, into the bag, unpack at home and put away! My regular food shops are Sainsbury and Lidl. I have yet to succumb to online food shopping apart from a holiday shop with my friend. It was great having it delivered to our holiday home!
DH and I love browsing charity shops for books and videos, never really found a bargain with clothes yet!
Now clothes shopping I love,[especially the shoe shops] not just browsing but actually buying but I tire easily these days and so of course the coffee breaks are as great as the shopping

3 Love of Flowers, Given, bought and grown!

I love flowers whether in my house or in my garden. I often buy flowers as a small gift and weekly buy flowers for the house, especially in summer when the CH is turned off.
Here are a selection of flowers that I was given for my 60th birthday in 2005, I bought myself for Valentine's day 2008, an Amaryllis given as a Christmas present 2008 and flowers growing in my garden last year 2008

2 Love of Cooking

Tuesday I made a Spicy bean and vegetable pie from a SW green recipe book. It was delicious but DH didn't eat it because he hates anything with chilli in it so I had the rest of the pie for lunch today.

I LOVE cooking and guess this was why I trained and became a Home Economic teacher though I stopped teaching Food Technology in 1987 and became a primary school teacher.

I HATE the washing up but I am fortunate that DH loves washing up and has done it every day for all our married life , Bless him xx

My 3rd Digi LO

Well I got more ambitious this afternoon and made my third digi LO and had the confidence to use it for the Weekly Challenge on UKS. It took me longer than using papers and stash IRL but what fun and sense of achievement I had!!

1 New love of digital scrapping

Here I am today having my first digi lesson over the phone from my 365 teamie Barbara. My first digi LO was Sorrento and my next was adding to photos and mounting them all on my own, I couldn't remember how to make ribbon or so a 'chalk'edge round the edge of the LO.
I found it hard work and tiring, but LOVED the challenge and the sense of achievment.
My dear friends on 365 have been so supportive and in the post last week were all these CD's from Shirley.

February - LOVE

Well we have just has our 2nd challenge from Anna bowkis for A Snapshot of our Life 2009 LOVE
I have planned 7 LOVES in my life which can also be a kind of hate relationship too with someof them!

An unexpected visitor

Well we opened our front door at 10pm on Tuesday to let our cats out and had an unexpected visitor! Someone had been in our garden and made this little man!

Yesterday morning I just had to show some hospitality and dress him up!! (the child still in me LOL!!)

The rains came last night and washed most of the snow away!

Snow

Well the snow came on Sunday to our SE corner of UK. As usual everything came to a stand still for 2 days with all schools closed and no buses or trains! Well we are a hilly town and normally never see snow!

The rest of the family at the meal!

The Birthday boys on Friday

This evening we are taking the family out to celebrate Mark's 39th last Monday and Iain's 33rd next monday, there will be 9 of us. I took this cake to the restaurant this afternoon. I hope we have a good evening and I hope Peter is home from fishing soon LOL!!

Went to our local college this morning to have my hair done by a student while her instructor (my hairdresser was assessed!) It was OK but think I could do it as well, she had never blown dried it with a curl, only straight and told me she finds blow drying hard !!! Gosh I look tired!!

Using Photoshop elements 5

Spent this morning working on an old photo my friend emailed me trying to put part of this week's Photoshop lesson in to practise! The before with torn edge and creases is on the left , the finished result ( as best I can do at the moment) is on the right. In my excitement I forgot to enhance the old phto with shadows and highlights, just remembered LOL!!

A Snapshot of my life January journalling for Routines

Here is my front page with SP produced twice in this collage!!, then page 2 for January and then the 7 pages of my routines and journalling. I decided not to add papers to each page but will chalk the edges of the recycled papers as I have on page 1 and 2. The next page for January will be my LO taking just 1 of Anna's sketches, I have 3 weeks to do this!!

Day 7 A Snapshot of My Life

Final day for January 7 days on my routines. Today we went to church, we normally go every week. It was a really wet day when you don't want to go out of the house but I was glad we went as the worship was fantastic and a great message today from Matt 25v 31 - 46 from a young physiotherapist who left our church to work in a remote part of Napal for several years and we have supported her during this time.
I will quote from the verse that touched me Matt v 40 2 ."....whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me."

I have been revising the lesson I had last week using Photoshop elements 5.0 to change the colour of part of an image and add an image from one photo to another. In another photo I practised erasing an image (a post) from the photo.
Here is the result of altering the larger photo above! It has taken me all afternoon!! No scrapping got done!!

Day 6 A Snapshot of My Life

I had to do our Saturday breakfast routine today. For years I have stayed in bed (what's new!!)and Peter gets up, makes a cup of tea, goes and buys the papers and then cooks a breakfast for us both. This started when he went to London or locally every Saturday to watch football and this meal kept us going until our evening meal.

We had a fun night tonight with friends at a quiz night raising money for Sierra Leonne. We had a table for 6 and the total evening raised over £1000!!Here I am concentrating hard on one of the questions!

Day 5 A Snapshot of My Life

I cannot believe I am uploading this to my blog, but hey this is the new me after 365 last year!!
My fortnightly routine is to have electrolysis for facial hair which seems to have developed as I go grey and older LOL!! So here I am at Ann's having the treatment this morning!!

Day 4 A Snapshot of My Life

Well I stayed in bed this morning while the rain lashed the windows and the winds blew round the house :( and snuggled under my duvet until mid morning trying to decide on my routine today......should I scrap or do the dreaded housework. I thought I would scrap but in the end did some DHW!!( Peter took the 9.17 bus to work, yes, he missed the 9.02 bus :) but I didn't get out of bed for him.) So this is my routine for today:) BUT please note those who know me, n0 ironing LOL!!
This afternoon I had problems with my Picasa programme, have had this problem since I added Photoshop elements 5.0 to my computer aand needed that programme for this collage so spent all pm trying to sort it out and finally did but now have a drink in one hand :( !!!

After SW Peter and I went to Ashford and met another UKS scrapper Karen and her husband for coffee, lunch and little retail therapy :) It was a great day and I think I have made another friend IRL after just being a cyber friend!!

Day 3 A Snapshot of My Life

Today I had my weekly routine of going to Slimming World to weigh in and stay for the 'chat'. I have been doing this since May 2009 [for 33 weeks excluding holidays] This week I have lost 3 1/2 lbs and I am very happy lady. The last certificate I received was for losing 31/2 stone I am now working towards my 4 stone award hopefully next month! We all take fruit each week for the Slimmer of the Week, today I took a grapefruit [and a banana for my breakfast!]

Day 2 A Snapshot of My Life

A few photos out of 41 taken in 20mins !! of a daily routine. Taking DH to town for his part time job he loves having retired 16yrs ago!! He works 3 hrs, 4 mornings a week and likes to get up at 7.30, I hate getting up and getting dressed so early now I am retired so Wed - Friday since the New Year he is now catching the first bus he can with a free bus pass at 9am - LATE for him but sheer bliss for me!!

Day 1 A Snapshot of My Life

Today was a monthly routine of haircuts for Peter and I. I have decided to take my daily photo as a collage of some of the photos. The hairdresser's daughter came today and took all these photos and more...41 in total! I think children often take good photos at good angles!

We went to stay with my college friend Ann and husband for the weekend. It was a great weekend, lots of chat, eating and drinking and a concert on sat night. Here is Ann and I

Winter Wonderland!

Where have the January days gone?

I had intended to try and continue daily with photos but..... haven't managed to!

We were away this weekend and saw a real 'hoare' frost on route to Beds and took these photos, a real winter wonderland.

1st snow of 2009

We woke to snow yesterday so I grabbed my camera and took this photo at 7.15am from bedroom window. Only a sprinkling but we do live on SE coast where we don't see much snow :)

2009

Iam going to continue with this blog as retired nana and show a variety of things in my life throughout the year whether scrapping or family life and things that interest me!

Today I am showing you the latest photo of me (New Year's day) put with that awful one of me on 4th Jan 2008!