Malvern - Marvellous!

We had a brilliant day out!

you can just read Quilt Pass - I washed my hands in the ladies

 We all got our hand stamped and them Mr M decided to stay outside for another cigarette while the rest of us went into the fray. I found several stands with stuff I desperately needed, fortunately Mr M hadn't caught up with me yet so I could only buy a cone of pretty sparklers chainette that I intend using on the christmas tags I am making to sell for charity. My daughter was enthralled by all the fabulous fabrics and has decided that she intends having a go at felting. She has the instructions and most all of the stuff so I think next weekend might see her having a go.

which way did we choose? neither, we went the pretty way 

 We met a dear friend while we were there so I got hugged too. Always a bonus. He had taken his mother to the show because the person she usually travels with is in hospital so our friend had the ticket instead. It's a good job he grew up in the rag trade and loves fabrics and is a brilliant machinist - he makes curtains and soft furnishings as his job and he has one of those huge expensive nine thread embroidery machines that I would love to play with...... one day.

we came home via our favourite diner

Afterwards we went across to Leominster, the pretty way, so that we could stop for a late lunch at the OK Diner. We have told far too many people about this place and it was absolutely crowded and we had to wait for a table and then wait for our food. We also had to wait for our stack of onion rings that was supposed to be a starter but didn't arrive until half way through eating our meal.
Not a glimmer of a panic attack at any time, so I am even more pleased about the day. Now I am going to take my cone of chainette up to the craft room and start cutting it into lengths for the tags.

Quilts, I like quilts

I wanted this to look like a tiled floor with leaves blowing

 Tomorrow Mr M and I are going to Malvern to the Quilt show. My daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter are coming too. I know this doesn't sound like much really. I mean everyone has the odd day out don't they? Well, you see, I. Don't. Go. Out.

Based on a postcard of Portmeirion - we love that place

 It kind of sneaked up on me when my parents came to live with us. They moved in at the end of December 1997 and while Mr M was a tower of strength and social services were really helpful I had the bulk of the caring. They eventually had to go into a home because I collapsed and that's when I realised that going out brought on the panic attacks. They went into the home in 2002 and it is only in the last year that I have been able to make the occasional trip out without Mr M. So I am getting better!

This is going to dear friends who recently got married

 I have wanted to go to Malvern for several years to see all the quilts. I used to make quilts - amongst other things - as you can see by the pictures of some of my better ones. I haven't done any sewing for ages, just haven't felt the urge to sit and fiddle but recently I have had the stirring of an idea for a quilt.




I look at these pictures and realise that I was quite good really. I shall probably be very disheartened by the standard of quilt tomorrow but I think I am quite proud of my work really - and I will hopefully get through the whole day without having a panic attack. Wish me luck!

Based on a painting by Helen Rich

...as Dreamers do....

Today is Story-Telling Sunday when we sit at our computer and write a story as our blog entry and then link up to Sian at Fromhighinthesky so that everyone can read all the wonderful stories. Take a look after you have read mine.

This happened last night so no one has heard this except me and Mr M. A bit of background first.

I have been making one of our five bedrooms into a craft room. I did this before but I used the smallest bedroom and then didn't like it because I always felt cramped and claustrophobic in there - and there was only room for me.

This time I am using the slightly bigger single room at the back of the house. This was where the Divine Miss Em slept when they were living with us and so it has a pink and purple decor with a border of Winnie the Pooh and Tigger too - just perfect for me.



 Because I don't carry things too well, because of the sciatica, it has taken a while to get everything upstairs. Miss Em and her Mum helped a lot but it still took me a while to get everything where I wanted it and for the pinboards to be fixed to the wall.
My lovely Son-in-law did that for me yesterday, drilling holes and using rawlplugs and making sure that nothing would crash down on my head.

During all this time Mr M has stayed out of the way. He has never coped well with moving things. We would have moved house several times if I had had my way but that's a whole other story. Where was I? Oh yes, the notice boards are up and the room is nearly finished.

I spent a happy couple of hours on iNternational Scrapbooking Day (another story too) completing a small album of pictures of my eldest grandson and beginning another small album for my eldest granddaughter. I suggested to Mr M that he should take a look at the room when he went up to bed because it looked really good and he said he would. I watched a little TV and then Mr M said he was going to bed.

I had just made a cup of cocoa for me so I said I would drink it and have a little read of my book before I too would go upstairs to bed. I read my book, finished my cocoa, cleaned my teeth and went to bed. Mr M said hello when I went into the room, this is his way of telling me that he was still awake and I didn't wake him. If I had woken him he would have simply huffed and puffed and turned over onto his other side.
As I got into my PJs I asked him if he had looked at my craft room. "Oh," he said sleepily, "I forgot, I'll look when I have to get up to go to the bathroom."

I will confess now that I was a little hurt that he should forget something so important to me but I realised that it probably didn't loom as large in his life as it did in mine so I said nothing. I got into bed, grabbed my reading-in-bed-book for another five minutes reading time and snuggled into the duvet. I had just got to the almost dropping the book stage when Mr M wriggled a little then said "It's very nice."

"What's very nice?" I asked, "Your craft room, it's very nice." He replied. "You haven't seen it yet," I said, closing my book and turning my head to look at him. "I did, just now when I went for a wee, I looked in the room." "You haven't been anywhere, you are still in bed and haven't moved." I said anxiously, wondering if he had actually had a wee in the bed! "Oh," he said, and paused for the longest time, "That was a really real dream then." and he laughed. Whenever he laughs I just can't help myself and I have to laugh too. So there we were at 11.30 at night lying in bed giggling hysterically.

I am glad to say that he had only dreamt he had a wee.

Now you can go and read all the other stories on Sian's blog.

Historical research

We all went to Tredegar House on Sunday. The National Trust have just taken it over on a 50 year lease from Newport Council. The trust will conserve and restore it to the tune of 4.5 million pounds. Newport Council bought it in the 1960s when St Josephs school moved to a purpose built glass box. A lot of residents in Newport said it was wrong of the council, that they shouldn't have spent money on a stately home that was going to cost a lot to keep standing. I was always sure they were so right.
 By leasing it to the National Trust they will put it in their handbook and immediately the potential visitors are trebled at least. They have changed the way you view the house and the garden and it is possible to see improvements even though it only opened on April 4th.
 There was an Easter egg hunt, so Miss M took part in that - with a little help from Mummy and Daddy.

I managed to take some pictures of the gates that were restored back in the 1960s by my Dad.The satyr face is cast iron and there was only one of the six originals that was in good enough condition to keep so Dad had to get them recast. He had eight done just in case there were any mishaps. Fortunately all of them cast perfectly so after the restoration was completed he still had two faces. One of them he added to a fireback that he made for the house we used to live in. He put the date that he made it onto the fireback in such a way that it seemed to say 1698 when what it actually says is 1968.
The other face is at the top of my stairs. It has been there for thirty years and because of this it is no longer seen by the family. Miss M was totally surprised when her Grandpa pointed to the gates and told her that she could see the face at home.

When we got inside the house there were loads of changes to what we could see. It was amazing to see how a wedding feast looked in medieval times - some of the house goes back that far while most of the main part was "modernised" in the 1600s. Charles 1 is said to have stayed there when drumming up money for the war he was having with the Roundheads.


There was a huge trunk of dressing up clothes and a shadow theatre and tables with games on them and Miss M had to try everything. She was a little reluctant to dress up until Mummy joined in. and everything was going just great until we overheard the room steward say to someone else "There's dressing up, for the children". We went on to have a play with the games and then upstairs to see the different displays. We loved the gentleman in the 1920s room who told us about Evan Morgan who had a crocodile in his bathroom and snakes that slithered freely around the house. He also had a parrot that he would put down his trousers and let it poke it's head out of his flies. The nice man didn't tell us about this because there were several children in the room but I already knew it.

In the Gilt Room there is the most wonderful painted ceiling and on previous visits I had to crane my neck to try and see it and pretty soon you get a pain down your back and start to feel queasy. Now they have put a day bed in there just like William Morgan would have had when the room was first decorated. Now you can lie down in the name of historical research - Miss M, Harry Bear and Mummy were delighted to test it. They found it good.

Trumpets of Doom

This story has been brought to you through "Story-telling Sunday" invented by Sian Fromhighinthesky  Why not pop over there after you have read my story and see all the other stories.

Our little van

In the mid eighties I had a games shop. I sold wargaming figures and Fantasy Roleplaying Games and figures. I also sold board games and the paints to do the figures but that's irrelevant here. I didn't make a lot of money, in fact I made very little money and was put out of business by shoplifters. That's not my story. Because I had to return a castle to the company that made it and it was too big for the post office to take we agreed to take it in our little van when we were going on a camping holiday and drop it off on the way. The company was in Boston Lincolnshire so we dropped off the castle and went on to Skegness to find a camping site.
Now you have to remember that we didn't have a tent so we had borrowed one off my cousin. Mr M had camped in this tent before, which was why we had borrowed it. We remembered when we were more than half way to Boston that we hadn't put the camping stove into the van when we packed it so we had no means of cooking anything - or boiling a kettle. Still it was an adventure.
The campsite in Skegness was flat, so that made things easy. There was no one there to check us in but there weren't many other campers, just half a dozen small caravans and one camper van. We chose a spot near the fence and dragged the tent out of the van.
This was where I discovered that while he might have camped in this tent before he had never put it up and couldn't remember how the poles fitted together or how they held up the canvas.
In fading light we spent over an hour fiddling with poles and crawling in and out of the tent fabric while the other one held it up. I had long hair then and even though it was in a plait it soon began to resemble a huge birdnest flopping around on my head. Eventually Mr M remembered how things went and we soon had the tent up and the guy ropes firmly pegged - to a smattering of applause from the other campers. Apparently we had provided some good entertainment and one or two were surprised that we didn't have a stand up row. What they didn't know was that we had lost our tempers and done the row bit when we had packed the van so there was no way we were going through that again, far too draining of energy!
We then went for something to eat and to ring Mr M's mother and tell her where we were - a tradition when we go on holiday "Hi Mam, guess where we are..." that sort of thing. We wandered along the promenade, looked at where the seas would be when the tide came in and then bought fish and chips and headed back to the tent.
As we walked down the slope to the campsite I said "ooh, look, donkeys!" and pointed to the overgrown field next to the campsite. Now, I don't know about you but if there are several animals in a field I have to count them, I just have to ok? "Seven donkeys, isn't that lovely?" Mr M glanced at them and, of course, because I had counted them, he had to count them too. "There's nine not seven" he said. I looked sharply at him and then turned to the donkeys and counted them again.
This time there were fifteen! "Great Scot! they must be coming out of the ground or something!" Another quick count, this time both of us were doing it, and there were twenty odd donkeys moving slowly through the belly high grass and weeds.
They were coming out of the ground. There was a tunnel that leads from somewhere by the beach and comes out in the field and that's where the donkeys were taken and their saddles and bridles taken off before they were let out into the field.
We ate our supper and as it was now quite dark we went to bed.
Sometime around 2am the world came to an end. Well, not really but I went from horizontal and asleep to sitting up terrified in one swift movement. Mr M was sitting beside me also wide awake and wondering what the unearthly noise was that we had heard. If my hair wasn't so long it would have stood on end.
And then it happened again
HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWW
You now have to try and imagine just how much like the trumpets of doom the sound of at least ten donkeys braying can be. Especially when they are lined up against the fence next to your tent.
Once my heart was back in my chest and not stuck in my throat I lay down and went right back to sleep again. Mr M said, in the morning, that my snoring soon soothed him and he fell asleep too.

Sundays are for......

There are times when your life seems to be a complete crock of... not very nice.

There are times when the weight of the world sits on your shoulders and as soon as you shift it the black dog of depression moves in and takes its place.

Good faces!

Then there are days when you wake up really early because you have to let the chickens out and the sun is shining. The mist is lifting from the river and you are having your hair cut at nine o'clock.

You just know that even though the sciatica has been really painful so that sitting, standing or lying down is impossible after a few minutes, that today is going to be a good day.

She really isn't disapproving

After the haircut we went to Monmouth for chicken food and then on up the A40 to Whitchurch where we stopped at Jo's place for lunch. I was very good and only picked up one book while I was waiting. They have bookshelves and you can have free books, you just have to give a donation in one of the charity boxes on the table.

We then changed direction slightly and headed for Hereford, until Mr M saw a road we haven't been on before so we meandered through the lanes for several miles. Quite a lot of miles really and eventually came out not far from Hampton Court Castle and Gardens - we are going there one day - and from there it was a matter of a couple of miles to the OK Diner for a refreshing cuppa and then home via Talgarth Tretower and Abergavenny.

Photograph keyring - fascinating

Today we did boring stuff like shopping in Costco and then Farm Foods and then rested to save ourselves for this evening when we went out with my son and his partner and their children and my daughter and her husband and their child. It sounds kind of cold when written that way but it's really not that way at all.

Chips are good, but only the soft ones

My youngest son was married to the WWC and then she divorced him because she had an affair - go figure. Now he has found a lovely lady, with all her own teeth (long story but it was an indicator of things to come) who is strong minded, doesn't smoke, likes to save money not spend it on ...........stuff. She is painfully shy but still strong enough to hold her own in our somewhat noisy family.  Her children are polite, well behaved and full of fun and a real pleasure to be with.

Cousins, so precious

My daughter is...............well she's my daughter and I have talked about her before. Being able to go out for a meal with them and to sit and eat and laugh and talk and not be afraid that something we say might offend is a real treat. So the whole weekend has been a really good family time. I just love it when that happens.

This here intarwebby...

Something that someone said on UKS (UKScrappers forum) triggered a thought about when we first connected to the internet. We first joined up in 1995. It was just before Christmas and we didn't really get going until the January of the following year.

around 2002

At the time I was writing Freeform Roleplaying Games, both on my own and as part of a team. My freeforms were murder mystery ones while the team I wrote with did fantasy ones based on a roleplaying game called Ars Magica. It was just so amazing to be able to send a message to someone at two in the morning, without disturbing them, and have a reply when we connected again the following day.
Of course it was dial-up and the modem was the smallest and slowest available - the only one available when we first started. Within the year we had upgraded to a 56k modem and couldn't believe how fast it was.
The hard drive of the computer was 100Mb and we thought we would never fill it! Actually, we never did fill it. Mr M had his game of the moment and I would go online - for an hour at the most because otherwise it was very expensive - and look at websites and write and answer messages on Rootsweb. A fabulous genealogy and family history site where you could talk to other addicts  like minded people about your obsession hobby.
This was also when my innate ability to kill computers was first made manifest. I would press the button to fire up the computer and all sorts of unexpected things would happen, all ending in the same way with the puter "falling over". Mr M upgraded to a bigger better faster machine with - pause for effect - 128Mb of RAM. I was given sole charge of the older machine, together with a scanner, a printer and use of the modem. Heaven.
At this point, for a joke because the machine still fell over if I touched the ON button with my finger, I used a pencil to push the button. The machine started perfectly. Next time I used my finger, nothing happened. I used the pencil and the machine worked. I continued to use the pencil for the rest the life of the machine. OH and we had slots for the 5 and a quarter floppy disks as well as the 3 and a half inch ones. Actually my present machine has a slot for a floppy disk. I suspect that I should go through the disks and see if there is anything I want badly enough to transfer it to a stick shouldn't I?

It is nothing short of amazing just how far technology has come in those 16 years. We now take our mobile phones for granted and complain when we can't get a signal and yet they were the exeption rather than the rule back then - and it is only 16 years!!
Isn't life just full of wonderful stuff?