Arctic Expedition

Hello again from a snow covered Manchester. I did have the bonus of a day off again yesterday but I had an annoying headache for most of it, hence the lack of bloggyness. I woke up to a phone call from the dentist at 7am who said she was going to attempt to drive in and would pick me up on the main road at 8am. I got ready for the snow with my hiking boots and gaiters and set off on my Arctic expedition :) It's so lovely walking in snow (apart from when people throw a bucket of water out their door in -17 temps-hello ice rink). My new winter love today is icicles. I don't think I've ever seen any as amazing as the one's I've seen today. These were the first I spotted,
and these were on the pub I waited outside.
It looks like something out of Disney :) We made it to work and I got to see minty again. He was covered in a lovely blanket of snow but still didn't want to start (love the colour of the sky in this one).I called out the AA again and the nice man said minty needs a new coil (didn't realise he was on birth control) and that he could tow me to a garage but they would charge me £200! He said we could buy the part and fit it ourselves for £40 so obviously that's what we decided to do. Brian rang a scrappy and they've got one for £20 so even better! Brian's going to get his car sorted tomorrow and then hopefully sort out minty. We only had about 4 or 5 patients turn up so we went home at 1 o'clock (I could get used to this) but I decided to walk as I needed to go to Tesco for supplies. It was such a lovely walk. I took so many picture but I'll share my fav's. This is the best I could get of the hills with my phones camera, they also look pretty but now they look amazing,
this is an arty one of a berry bush that looked lovely
and (yay) more icicles on our drain pipe.It's weird how everything looks so nice with snow on. I can't stop looking out the window. The photo's just don't seem to do it justice. I'll be back in tomorrow but only for the morning again. It looks like we'll probably be cancelling the chicken keeping course this weekend as we may not have a car and it's probably not worth driving out in the snow but there should be another one we can book on to soon. I'm pretty sure anyone reading this (if there is anyone) is pretty bored of reading about snow now so this is my last snow picture......for today anyway :) I took it from the same place as when I took the picture on this post back in October,

The weekend of lovely gifts :)

Well here I am back again in the new year and excited to be blogging still, especially as I've had my first ever comment and not from family but from the lovely Lorilee of Cackleberry Cottage blog all the way over in Texas, USA :) so thank you for the message and the encouragement to keep blogging Lorilee.

Me and Brian had a lovely quiet night in on New Years Eve with a Darling buds of May marathon accompanied by lots of cheese and wine. We headed down south on New years day as it was my Mum's 50th birthday weekend. We had a great time with lots of surprises. My lovely mum had prepared a mini Christmas for us when we got there (with a full roast!) so even though we had lots of presents at Christmas we had even more to open! Luckily I'm truly my mothers daughter and had bought them all some extra presents too :) Along with some other lovely things they had got me a new purse from none other than Cath Kidston and I can't explain how much I love it! It even matches my new red roses hand bag I got in the sale :) Look at it, isn't it amazing? :)My parents also got us a great book on Alpaca farming which will come in very useful soon and they very generously gave us some money which me and Brian have decided to use to buy the Chicken Ark I blogged about last time so needless to say I'm very excited! They also got me this pretty red jumper from Joe Brown which I am wearing now as I blog :) Aren't I lucky? :)Saturday we went to visit our friend Sally (who I miss loads) who has just moved on to a farm in such a pretty location. We went for a walk to the poets stone (a very high hill with stunning views) and then had some stolen loaf and hot juice back at her house. Saturday evening was my Mum's cheese and wine birthday party which was great fun and I got to wear my lovely new dress I got from Next in the sale which you can see here (not modeled by me!) which went perfectly with an antique style white rose necklace my sister gave me.Sunday was my Mum's actual birthday and we went for a lovely meal at the pub up the road. I'm happy to report my sister is doing well after her hip operation and is whizzing around on crutches and should be back in college tomorrow. We travelled back Sunday afternoon and came home to yet another blanket of snow. I managed to make it in the work this morning but minty decided he'd had enough after the 500mile round trip and stopped working at lunch time today! This wouldn't be so much of a problem if it weren't for the fact that Brian's car died last week...

...as I wrote that sentence Brian called me downstairs to let me know he fixed his car with a new battery! Hooray! At least we have one car working now :) Minty is currently sat outside work waiting for the AA who can't come out till tomorrow so I will let you know how he gets on in a later blog. At least I don't have to walk to work in the snow tomorrow :)

My final pieces of exciting news are all crafty really. I spent a few evenings last week reading through the whole of Diary of a Tiny Holder blog and getting so inspired by Sian and her amazing craftiness so I have decided to start knitting. I have also been wanting a sewing machine for a while now but her blog really got me wanting one and by sheer coincidence, whilst I was down at my parents, my God mother offered me hers as she is getting a new one for her birthday! How amazing is that!? My Mum and Sister are going to be bringing it up for me when they make their first visit up here in Feb. My final bit of news is that my Mum has in trusted me with her 30 year old kenwood mixer (which was a gift from my Great Nan) as Mum got a new one for Christmas. I am so excited about this as it has so many memories of baking and cooking from my childhood so I cant wait to use it :)

I'll leave you tonight with a picture of the ice skating ducks in the park across the road :)P.S. Brian has just told me that he has handed the notice in on our flat so we are officially moving! Hooray!

P.P.S. I just looked out the window to see a blizzard falling out the sky! Fingers crossed we're snowed in tomorrow :)

Minty's broken doughnuts

Hello again :) over a week since my last blog again. Lots of things have happened since then. I blogged last week the day before my interview. Well the interview went really well and I was offered the job pretty much on the spot and they upped the hours to 4 days a week for me. I just had to get my registration sorted. I hadn't originally planned to nurse again so I hadn't re-registered but the lack of jobs has sent me back into my old job again so my registration has gone off to the GDC and now I just have to wait. There are so many things I want to blog about on here. I think I might have to start doing smaller daily blogs to keep up!

I'll move onto the cooking section of my blog for now. Me and Brian fancied some home made soup last weekend and you can't have homemade soup without warm homemade bread so Brian got to work on the veg soup and I made the bread. I used the bread mix again like we used for the pizza dough. Here you can see my bread before baking and Brian's soup mid-cooking








and here's the end result. Both were very yummy :)








I got the random urge last week to start up some volunteering again, Not really sure where it came from but it seemed like a good idea. I had a look on the do-it website (brilliant site) which gave me the idea for helping out at Brownies. I loved Brownies and Guides when I was younger and I love the idea behind it of involving kids in the community and giving them positive roll models. I sent off an email to the area's district leader saying that I'd like to help out ideally on a tuesday or wednesday (Brian's college nights) and I got a phone call the next day. She was really happy I had rung as it turned out she had just heard that a Brownie group in Stalybridge had just let her know it was closing down and it also happens to run on a tuesday night! She was planning on having me go along with another one of her guiders until I was happy to run it. So tuesday night arrived and I went along to the meeting not knowing what to expect. There turned out to be 11 girls in the 7th Stalybridge Brownie group and they are all so lovely. It's currently beeing run by two lovely ladies who have been running it for many years but who are finding they just don't have the time free to commit to it any more. I really loved the evening and they bought some lovely flowers for me which you can see here. They got me the roses and Brian got me the white flowers along with Terry's chocolate orange with popping candy (how amazing!) for getting my job.I have had loads of fun planning things for the Brownies to do next tuesday. It will be diwali next saturday so I have been thinking of games and activities based around that so I'll let you know how it goes.

My next story this week is all about my beloved car minty. I was spending Monday and Tueday at the dental practice observing their way of doing things and on the Tuesday morning I was driving to the practise when there was a horrible clunk under my car and then a nasty scrapping sound. I worked out what the problem was straight away and luckly managed to dragged minty and all his bits back to the house. This picture shows what I found when I got there.Poor old minty :( We also thought there was a hole in the exhaust so we decided to get it all sorted. Brian's friend James works in a tire and exhaust garage and he said we could bring it down so my lovely, manly fiance went and tied my exhaust up with some wire and while he was doing that he found the culprit. Minty had a dodgy doughnut! There are two of these things holding the exhaust up. I'm pretty sure you can work out why mine fell off from this pic.The exhaust fell off again half way to hyde so lovely Brian got out and tied it up again on the road side (isn't he great). James got minty up on the ramp when we got there and gave him two new doughnuts and gave me some spares :) he also had a look at the hole and welded it up for me
and now Minty is better than ever and he didn't charge us a penny! What a lovely man :) James told us there was a quiz on that night at his pub so we decided to pop down there to buy him a pint for doing the work on minty (even though he ended up buying us one in the end!). We weren't intending on staying for the quiz but we sat on a table with a team and really started getting into it and ended up joining in and eventually we won! It was a great quiz night with loads of games like 'what's in the box' and 'quingo' (my favourite) and we ended up getting home after midnight. Thinks its on every thursday so we might be going back again :)

I'm off to plan a bit more for Brownies now so once again I'll leave you with a lovely picture from up North. This weeks is a very local one from Stalybridge itself. I took it standing on the bridge by the post office. It's the river Tame which gives Tameside it's name and I think is very lovely :) bye for now xx