On this Day - 2008

May 11th 2008. This photo tells me that we’re at the top of the Kirkstone Pass in the Lake District, perhaps we stopped for a bite to eat, or maybe a drink. It looks like we sat outside so the weather must have been pretty good and I’ve not included any folk in the shot so I guess it may have been busy. Actually I know the weather was good and I know that we stopped for a very late lunch because the other photos around this date tell me exactly where we were and what we were doing – It was our Porsche weekend.

T’hubby had turned 50 in the January and as a special present I had bought him a Porsche Boxster for the weekend. Well a Boxster isn’t much use in January is it and so we’d booked the actual weekend for later in the year. We were so very lucky with the weather, it was gorgeous and the top was down pretty much all of the time. We wanted to ‘experience’ the car and so we drove all the way up to Northumberland avoiding motorways as much as possible. We spent two nights in a lovely little b&b in an off the beaten track village whose name escapes me presently. We visited Lindisfarne and Bamburgh Castle in addition to numerous other pretty little villages and coastal towns along the way. For our return journey we drove down through the lakes with our final stop en-route being captured above. A truly magical weekend.

What do your photos tell you about ‘today’ in previous years?

Thanks for stopping by and please feel free to leave me a comment.

Wendy xx

A year ago today

Well well well, I would never have thought to look back into my blog to see what I posted about this time last year. To be honest, I did rather expect to find zilch as my posting, since I started, has been sporadic to say the least. But no, there in front of me was a post from the 6th April 2010. It was just a short one with one photo, full of excited tension and I remember the day well. You can, if you really want to, see the post here but believe me there isn’t much to it and I’ll have to explain it all in this post to make any sense anyway. Lol, the title of it is ‘Long time no blog’ which pretty much sums me up.

The post talks about the fact that we were (im)patiently waiting to find out if our offer on this gorgeous little cottage had been accepted. Gosh I can remember just how I felt; nervous, excited, apprehensive, aaarrrghhhh – I just wanted to KNOW, didn’t that Estate Agent know just how mega important this was?? I guess not because it took them hours, all day in fact, and finally when the office had closed for the day I had to accept that they weren't going to tell us yet. Still once the office had closed I could relax a little, until the next morning that was, when it started up all over again. Phew, it was a nerve wracking time, really draining actually. But on day two we did get the call ……..

……  it was a no. NO, how can that be! Someone had put the same offer in as ours just earlier and, after much deliberation, the vendors had decided to go with the folks who’d made the first offer - there was nothing else to split us. Pete was devastated, he had completely fallen in love with it and although I didn’t blog about just how sad it made us, that too I can remember vividly. We sat around for a while feeling sorry for ourselves but gradually we moved on. We’d been umming and ahhing (how do you spell that, I googled to check and that was the general consensus, well on one site anyway lol) about stuff but now we committed to extensive work at the back of our house and we decided to take a break, just the two of us. It was meant to be Ibiza but we fell foul of the ash cloud and ended up driving across to France. We did have a wonderful time though and little did we know that this would be our last break in our little car – I must come back to that point.

The break was really rather liberating, we had no accommodation booked, we just set off. Above, I think Pete is just about to telephone some hotel, somewhere where we thought it might be good to head. Neither of us had holidayed this way before and I loved it, although we did have one occasion where we’d spotted a nice looking place in a book and were heading towards it but couldn't get in touch with anyone for hours but it all turned out well in the end.

Back home the date was scheduled for work to commence and we’d started tentatively looking at other properties again. The weekend before the work started we had a nosy at this property here – The Old School House.

Isn’t it picture postcard material. It was gorgeous and had a wonderful character inside, even the coat pegs were still there. It wasn’t without potential problems though and so, although we loved it, it wasn’t a dead cert. However, then the estate agent dropped his bombshell - the purchasers had pulled out and the original cottage was ours if we wanted it.

IF, IF – well what do you think we did?

Thanks for dropping by and please feel free to leave me a comment.

Wendy xx

Today in History - 22nd February

On this date in 1879, Mr F.W.Woolworth opened his first 'five-and-ten-cent' store in Utica, New York. How sad that 131 years later they no longer exist, but only recently! Everyone remembers a good old Woolies store. Ok, they had changed over the years, of course they did. Ours in Wolverhampton was spread over three floors when I first started my girlie trips to town, by the time it closed it was down to one. The 'pick and mix' wasn't always evident either but they could be relied upon to have pretty much any household item you may have wanted.

Today in 2010 I need to get my backside into gear, lots to do in preparation for the new bathroom. Top of my list today is to order the radiator and I want to get some scrapping done. I feel the need to be creative. I got chatting with a lass at the gym this morning - I've seen her there lots and we always nod and say hi but we've never 'chatted'. I won't bore you with the details but I found her to be quite forthright and display an inner strength that I found quite empowering. Not sure if that makes sense but she was a really nice person, not afraid to speak her mind and be strong. And so I am going to take a leaf out of her book and get on with stuff.  So, hopefully I'll be back later with some wonderful creation or other and have ticked off some of my 'to do's lol.