You are my sunshine

my only sunshine.....

I seem to have been doubly lucky this week as the wonderful Rebecca at daydreams in lace gave me this little ray of sunshine

Which I will pass on to the following lovely bloggers;

Gaynor - Our Day by Design

Catherine - Some vague Utopia

K, tea

Buhdoop

You Can't Take it With You

Oh so glamourous

So while I wait for my writing inspiration to return I thought I'd pass this lovely award onto some lovely bloggers whose writing I find inspiring.

Firstly thanks to Gaynor from Our Day by Design who bestowed this lovely award on me

Now to pass it on to some glamourous ladies:

Lila Puppy Loves

Rebecca at Daydreams in lace

Wellies & Vogue

Mrs T at 99+ Forever

Alyndabear

A Chocolate Lovers Confessions

My weekend

Hmmm so writing I should probably get around to doing some of that right.
So this weekend, I'm on my own - O is in Spain playing his bizarre sport for Scotland (still not going to tell you what it is). So I'm doing some sofa bonding, my favourite activity! I'm catching up on trashy TV, reading and sleeping. Think I've got a throat infection, but I'm ignoring that hoping it might go away.

I had a back massage last night to ease me into the relaxation. I love getting back massages I’m not your fancy-pants brush your fingers across my back type of a girl. I’m a go hell for leather get you knuckle into that knot in my muscle type of girl. And oh my goodness the girl last night showed no mercy. My shoulders now feel pretty bruised but I’m going back in 3 weeks to have another round. That all sounds a little brutal sorry!

The relaxation was a little disturbed today by a phone call from the fraud department of my credit card. Now I’m suspicious of anyone who phones me and then asks for my personal details. Not to mention the fact that about 4 months ago my Aunt was conned out of £2,000 by someone ‘apparently’ calling from her credit card fraud department (she was refunded). So the sceptic in me refused to talk to the perfectly pleasant woman who phoned and called the number on the back of my credit card and true enough I was put through to the fraud department. Someone has tried to purchase something online in America and last night tried to make a payment to a company in Croydon last night at 0:02 (I was sleeping at that time). Thankfully the fraud department spotted something dodgy and denied both payments so I haven’t lost any money and all I need to do is wait for my new card to arrive.

Hope you are having an enjoyable relaxing weekend (other than Rebecca who I hope is having a productive weekend).

The Joys of Cat Ownership II

Our cats seem to dislike our kitchen wallpaper as much as we do. They've started removing the wallpaper on their own. They seem to have a penchant for textured wallpaper which is why I'm trying to rid my house of it completely.

Our kitchen wall

(image me)

Pitlochry

This weekend we went up to Pitlochry to the salmon ladder, was nice to get out in the fresh air for a while even though there was still a lot of snow around making it slippy under foot. There were no fish in the ladder it being completely the wrong time of year. We're planning on going back when we might see some fish. Hope you had a good weekend I'd love to hear what you got up to.

Sleep

(image from here via here)

I like my sleep. When I don't get enough I get very prickly.

I haven't been getting enough recently (I mean sleep don't be so flithy minded!)

I just can not turn my brain off, I'm thinking about work, blog posts but mainly wedding plans and all the things I need to get done. Had my first wedding nightmare last night - our photographer cancelled on us the day before the wedding. I'm thinking that this has something to do with the fact that we haven't booked a photographer yet and meeting a couple next week.

Anyway I'm not here to moan - that is just dull.

I usually need 7-8 hours of sleep a night to function properly, although I'd prefer 9-10. I've a friend who only needs 4-5 hours a night which I just can't grasp.

So what about you? Are you a 7-8 hour person or is that too much for you?

O also talks, murmurs and breathes too damn loudly (but that only seems to be when I can't sleep so maybe it is just magnified in the wee hours) in his sleep. I apparently don't make a noise in my sleep. What about you are you a noisy sleeper

Sleep well.....zzzzzzzzzzz

Ring a ding ding

So when we picked up my engagement ring we also ordered our wedding rings.

Mine will be a 2.5mm plain palladium band which will be fitted to the wave of my engagement ring. What? You didn't know that my ring was palladium and you can't see from the picture that it has a wave? Thats probably because I never got round to sharing anymore details - the picture may help a little.

(photo me)

O has decided he will have a ring - although he might not wear it for the first 40 years of our marriage. After further investigation and advice from a wise blogger we decided not to go for a wood inlay. His will be a 5mm handbrushed concave palladium band. The picture below is as close as I could find - imagine it handbrushed (or prescratched as I'm thinking of it).

Image above is from here - which also happens to be the jeweller we are getting our rings from.
Why the wave? Because O loves the sea and the water - it was his only design request for the ring.
Why palladium? Simple platinum was out of our budget

Working 9-5

(from here)

I stick my tongue out when I'm concentrating - all the women in my family do.

Things are sooooo hectic at work at the moment which means I end the day feeling rather brain dead.

January Blues

(from here)

I love this post by Snippet & Ink

Have a lovely weekend. I hope you have fun stuff planned. We don't have anything planned. Looking forward to doing nothing.

Bitten by those pesky vampires

In my family we read a lot. When we visited #1 to babysit my niece and nephew for the week she had just finished reading the Twilight series and out of idle curiosity I borrowed the books thinking I’d get round to them eventually. Well eventually arrived between Christmas and New Year when I consumed the whole saga. The books seems to divide people some hate them, some love them, I have to admit I enjoyed them. I’m going to hold off a while and then watch the films (I hate watching films of books I’ve recently read they are never as good – I visualise the characters differently from the filmmakers – funny huh?!)


(image from here)

Relationship Advice

(via Motley Photos)

O and I are both duvet stealers however we have come up with an ingenious solution to this issue - which used to cause a lot of sleepy arguments.

I didn't realise it was quite so ingenious until I shared it with my sisters and friends, they'd never considered it. Apologies if I'm telling you something you already know.

We have a standard UK double bed - so not awfully big. However (drum roll please) we have a king size duvet!!! So there are no more fights, the duvet is so enormous that it covers us both just fine. But still allows me to stick my leg out the side to regulate my temperature and allows O to tuck himself into a little cocoon without leaving me coverless.

I can not recommend this solution enough. From now on we will always buy a duvet bigger than the bed.

Weekend recap

Did you have a good weekend? I did although the journey to London was horrendous (I arrived in Wimbledon at 3am). Really need to stop trying to get anywhere with the weather as it is. I’m sorry, I would love to write you a long detailed post about bridesmaid dress shopping but I’m shattered and writing is not coming easy at all. However there is good news, I think we’ve sorted the dresses for my ladies. #2 has a friend who is a very talented dress maker and she is going to make them for us – easy eh? We spent Saturday looking at shapes and styles and working out what suits them and then Sunday morning we spent chatting with the lovely dress maker and explaining what we are after. We are going to get silk samples to see the different qualities and to get the right shade – going for midnight/ink blue for the grown ups and a pale cornflower blue (we saw 3 different cornflower blues so that isn’t very specific) for my niece.

Really pleased to have something else ticked off the list. My tasks for this week are to make a short list of the photographers we have contacted and arrange to meet them. I also need to start contacting ceilidh bands who will also do some old time favourites (if my Scottish readers have any suggestions I’d love to hear them).

How are things going with your wedding to do list. Did you see Gaynor's list here? I'd love to be this far along in the planning process although every time I read one of Gaynor's lists my own gets longer because of the sheer amount of stuff that hasn't even crossed my radar yet.

The best Christmas present ever

(although I have to say Zoe's is pretty effing cool)

This pretty little ring got redesigned and we picked it up just before Christmas.

Yes I've been engaged since August and yes I've only just got my engagement ring. Yes I have the patience of a saint.

Not really though, we were very particular about the design and it has been totally worth the wait.

Describing the whole process is going to take me some time but I thought I'd just give you the basics.

LOVE IT!!!!!!!!!

(not sure why I have yellow hands, they don't look like that in real life)

Happy Weekend

This weekend I'm flying to London (hopefully fingers crossed for the weather) to go bridesmaids dress shopping with #1, #2 and my niece - my bestwomen.

Tempted to get them dresses like these:

(image from here)

But hopefully we'll end up with something more like these:

(image from here via here)

Will let you know how we get on next week.

Hope you are doing something fun. UK readers please wrap up warm it is going to be a cold one. And take care of icy pavements.

O still don't read - Exciting News Part 2

I thought this was the dress (ignore the fact that it is shiny satin I hadn’t figured out that I didn’t like that yet. I luuurrrrve the pleats). I asked my Mum and #2 to come up and give me their final opinion and I was going to place the order. I wanted to get the dress ordered before Christmas as I was told repeatedly that it takes 6 months for the dress to come in.
Then the snow came and #2 got stuck in London, luckily or perhaps not so luckily as I’ll explain my Mum made it. I’d two appointments booked for the Saturday because I was going to make #2 try on bridesmaids dresses, the appointments fell so that the first appointment of the day was a shop I’d not visited yet. As it was their first appointment of the day I felt bad about cancelling and so my Mum and I went along anyway. Liz who I believe owns the shop was so nice, I explained that I thought I’d found my dress but I would like to see what she had in her store. I pulled out about 4 dresses to try on and Liz showed me another few options, things weren’t looking good and I was even more determined that the other dress was the one. Then Liz said she had one final dress for me to look at. Guess what it was the one!

Why is it better than the other one? It is silk and therefore incredibly light, it is not shiny or bling or lace etc. and therefore will not scare O. It is understated and makes me feel like me (bingo).Ok so it doesn’t have as much ruching as I maybe would have liked but it is darn close to what I want. I don’t like the pictures of the dress online at all so if you’d like to see some hideous pictures of me they are here and here (head chopped off to preserve my anonymity).

All sorted – yup?

Oh no nothing could ever be that simple. 3 hours after we had ordered the dress and as I was taking my mum to the station for her journey back home she pipes up with “I’m just not too sure about the colour” – er you what? The dress comes in either antique a pale gold/champagne colour or ivory, which was very very white. We had ummmed and ahhhed in the shop for a really long time, I was worried that the antique would be too dark and yellowy and that the ivory would be too white against my blue skin. In the end we had settled on antique and I didn’t really need the only other person to see me in the dress raising doubts. After a few very tense days I decided just to stick with my initial decision, I hope it is the right choice – I just have to keep remembering how I felt in the shop.

Sorry to end on a downer, I am very pleased with the dress and I'm overly excited that I don't have to go dress shopping anymore!!

Next bit of exciting news next week - turns out I do like a little tiny bit of bling......

O don't read - Exciting News Part 1

So the first piece of exciting news, I was tempted to make you wait until next week but that would be cruel. If you have been reading the comments on both Rebecca’s blog and mine you might have guessed that I have ordered my wedding dress.
First a little bit of background, do you remember the list? Well although the list had some very good logical points not all of them made it into the dress.

Lessons I have learnt:
Long dresses have to hang from somewhere (startling eh?). Dresses which hang from under the boobs make me look pregnant. Dresses which hang from the waist make my hips look enormous. Dresses which are fitted past my hips and then hang give me quite a pleasant hour glass figure (who knew).

There are very very few wedding dresses out there with straps. The dresses I found which did have straps did something strange to my boobs. Either they disappeared completely, which is shocking for a more than DD girl, or they gave me so much cleavage I blushed (I’m not a cleavage on my wedding day type girl).

Lace just doesn’t suit me. I still don’t do bling and definitely no bling on the top half of the dress. I’m ever so slightly obsessed with ruching. I like silk (I’m ducking for a telling off from Rebecca as I have no knowledge of fabrics and probably shouldn’t be wanting a silk dress).

I like Alan Hannah dresses – no complete dresses, tops off some and skirts off others. Two shops I visited contacted Alan Hannah and they would have made changes or combined the dresses that I liked but because I couldn’t picture them or try them on it made my brain hurt.

I’m getting married in the wrong year – one kind dress assistant told me. The designers are not making plain dresses this year the trend is for bling or lace. If I want to get married in 2010 I’m going to have to have one or the other. Er naff off, I’ll just go look somewhere else, I’m not putting off my wedding just to wait for the fashion to change. I think you’ll find that your taste in dresses means that all you stock are jewel encrusted fairy dresses and that is why there isn’t anything in your shop for me. Phew sorry rant over!

So the list now looks like:
Strapless, lightweight, no bling, fitted to the hips, ruching, a small skirt, small train and silk.

Then we get onto the budget. I’m not a very extravagant girl so I set my budget pretty low (unrealistically low it turned out initially). I have a car to pay off, a kitchen to save for and honestly better things to waste my money on than a dress I’m only going to wear for about 10 hours. Ha – try telling that to my heart and my brain. I have an uncanny ability to be drawn to the most expensive dresses in shops. Hence the love of Alan Hannah and the fact that I’m green with envy over Rebecca’s dress by Suzanne Neville, had I not found my dress when I did I was totally going back for this dress or this one (to hell with the budget – who wants a new kitchen when you can float about in dresses like these, and I’m sure I could have worn it on other occasions like erm doing the housework?).

Anyway is that "get to the point I hear you screaming?" Be back tomorrow with the all important details (mwahhhaaahhhaa evil laughter)……

Hogmanay Recap

Between Christmas in Leeds and in preparation for New Year with O’s family in the Highlands we spent a few days in our little flat – O did his Christmas shopping saving it for the January sales what an interesting plan. We put away our little Christmas tree and did plenty of sorting and washing.

On the 30th we set off early in the morning so as to get north in the day light, the snow covered the hills and the drive through Glencoe was breathtakingly beautiful, the trees along the road were bowed like old men under the weight of the snow. I spotted lots of gentle deer snuffling in the snow looking for food, I refused to let O look around he needed to concentrate on the road. After a few hairy moments in the snow we finally reached O’s parent’s little cottage, I was very disappointed to find out we’d missed a fabulous display of the Northern Lights the night before - I’ve never seen them and they didn’t make a reappearance during our visit. We had a wonderful few days; Hogmanay we got snowed in so spent the evening just O’s parent and us playing dominoes and cards, we lit a small fire and had sparklers and brandy for the bells. On the 1st we went to O’s sister’s house for a winter BBQ, on the 2nd we had a bonfire. Lots of being outside in the cold crisp air led to a very tired R and lots of sleeping.

I really like my in-laws (I’m very lucky they are lovely people and we get on well) and this visit was so nice, due to the weather it meant that we had to spend all our time together. Not that we wouldn’t want to spend time together it is just that usually we are off seeing O’s friends and they are busy people with their own friends.

All in all we had a very pleasant introduction to 2010.

Apologies for the quality of the photos they were taken by me (not a good start) from a moving car (double trouble)!

Christmas Recap

I’m back I missed you all. Got exciting news (well I think it is exciting and therefore I'd like to share it with you).

First a few recaps though;

Christmas
Journey home – usually not remarkable enough to comment on however this particular journey in the snow was the most terrifying experience of my life – O is my hero I don’t know how he kept driving not being able to see the road in our silly new car with its silly big tyres that glide rather than grip. (I do like the car however we haven’t had a very good introduction as all the significant journeys we’ve done so far have been marred by snowy, icy roads and too many skids). It took 9 horrid hours to drive 250 miles – as you can probably tell I’m still not over the trauma and I'm perhaps still a little melodramatic.

Christmas day was very strange, all us trying to please other people and ending up with no one all that pleased. My parents desperately trying to make O feel welcome while I was trying to show O how we have a traditional family Christmas. By the end of the day we’d opened presents, eaten lots of food, watched the Queen’s speech and had a good few arguments – probably actually our traditional Christmas day routine. (Thank you for all the veggie Christmas day suggestions, my folks went to M&S and I think bought their entire veggie selection.)

Boxing Day was much more like it, my sisters and their other halves arrived plus my niece and nephew. All 10 of us wrapped up warm and went for a big long walk in the snow; we went sledging in the local park where the hills had turned to sheets of ice; we opened lots of presents, ate even more food and had a Wii competition.


General observation – Christmas cracker jokes are appalling. Christmas cracker maths tests that require a pen and paper and knowledge of simultaneous equations are completely unnecessary where is the fun in that? Well when you are at a table with two accountants, my Dad with his maths degree, #2’s boyfriend with his engineering degree it proves to be quite an exciting competition – totally went over my head though.