You might be able to tell I've been playing with the layout?

Hellooooooo!

Guess what I've been doing this morning? Yes, that's right - playing with the template & colours of the blog layout. What do you think? I wanted something that was a bit wider and had a different feel to it. I'm hoping the layout will mean I can fit more photos on without having to save and view 200 times during the creation of each post to see where the text & photos appear in relation to each other.

Lets see how this goes.

Comment if you would like to!

Liza

Yummy Pizza

Oh, we had a DELICIOUS tea last night - home made Pizza. A ~slight~ cheat as we used ASDA Pizza base mix. Not too much of a cheat though, it saves the weighing out of the yeast & flour, all you add is the water, but you still have to kneed the dough and leave it to rise.

In the meantime we cooked the remaining meatballs from Saturday night's dinner, made a little tomato sauce, and prepared the pizza stone by heating it in the oven.

The results were SOOOOO tasty that we've had part 2 of the leftover pizza, cold, for tea tonight - and it's STILL fantastic!

How good does that look? Yum!

Needlework - Extreme Closeups!

Well, a little bit more stitchin' has been going on, and I'm really making in-roads into the green.

But, there's a bit of a problem. I've mostly been doing fiddley bits, flowes and suchlike, which have not really covered large expanses with the same colour, but now I'm on the green, it's only 'light' or 'dark' so there's not much changing of colour, direction or thread to break up the colour block. So, it's much more noticeable if there's a difference in tension between stitches.

Anyway, I find that if I don't concentrate, and maybe do a row which has more tension, or less tension in the stitches, you get a stripe!

The top pic shows this quite clearly, in the middle of the lighter green expanse there's a tighter row, followed by a puffier one - hence, a little stripe.

I'm going to have to be really careful when I start on the cream which is the solid background colour, or it'll just be stripe-tastic!

Anyway, I spotted the above little glitch in the green, and, after an initial panic (Oh no I've spoiled it) I began having creative thoughts about the texture opportunities afforded by a bit of tight/loose stitching. (I think I must be catching it from my lovely friend Emma over on Mimi & Tilly who is having a super creative year.)

I thought I'd have a go at taking pictures so you can see the texture provided by the contrast between the stitches and the canvas.

I really like this!

In between starting each block of colour or pattern, I spend alot of time looking at the canvas, and running my hand over it. I really like the texture - it doesn't come over very well in the photos I've taken so far.

I'm hoping you get the feel for it from these pictures.


The rest of the extreme closeup pics are over in my 'Neeldework' album on Picasa.

Super night!

I met a couple of new people last night - Dan's friend "Snapey" (previously mentioned for doing the Helvellyn Triathlon) and his other half Lydia.

They came over for dinner, and it was a fab night. The wine and conversation flew - and the food wasn't too bad either!

The only downside was that the guys had to leave early Sunday morning so we couldn't do any breakfast/brunchy things - just what Sunday mornings are for!

Oooops!

We were making our tea last night and just as I was squeezing the tube of tomato pure (very hard) into the pan - it squirted out at an angle - all down the front of Dan's trousers! Ooooops!

He wouldn't let me take a photo for the blog tho. Booooo.

So here is a picture of my lovely coffee from this morning.



The double skin glass mugs are really cool, act like a thermos flask, and only cost about £4 from Sainsbury's!

...and run VT

Janey has been working on loads of different shows recently - Piers Morgan, Jools Holland and yesterday Alan Titchmarsh. Yes I know they're not all BBC but it would seem that the BBC department she works for, sell their services to whomever requires expert VT operators! So this is her Alan Titchmarsh credit I grabbed from the ITV Watch Again website...


Cool huh? You can watch the show here...ITV Player: The Alan Titchmarsh Show - Nov 10th and to get to the credits, scroll right to the end - about 45 minutes in - it then makes you watch a couple of adverts (well, who do you think this is, the BBC?) and then you get the last minute or so of the lovely John Sergeant's interview. Janey's name appears at the bottom of the 3rd page of credits!

Exciting!

Lovely tea last night

Mmmmmmm! Dan's been cooking again. I know it looks like squash, but Dan has made his first foray into the world of carrot soup! Completely delicious. Just a little hint of lemon and pepper. Otherwise it was aaaaaaaaaalllllll carrot!

So, that was the starters! For mains it was fillet steak butties on soft white bread. YUMMMEEEE!

I'm so spoiled!

Here are the latest needlework pics

The top left picture is taken with it flat down so you can see the pattern

The bottom 2 pictures are with the light shining through so you can see the extent of the stitching.

Really it's only the green and blue leaves I've got to
finish - not that that's a small job, but I never thought I'd get this far!

Oh, and the small blue flowers!


The blue colours are the hardest to do as there are 5 blues in the picture and a couple of the threads are very similar shades. I've already made one mistake, in the flowers currently rolled into the bottom of the frame.

You might not be able to see in the small pictures posted here - but if you click on the top pic to enlarge it, you'll see that in 3 blue leaves that fan out from the main section in the middle, ALL 5 shades of blue are present! I can hardly *SEE* all 5 shades in the colours printed on the canvas, so I need really good daylight to sew it in - hence I'm currently on a mission with the green - it's either light, or dark! Easy to do on these dark nights!!!

Chilled out in Scotland

Gosh, it seems like such a long time ago, but it was the last week in September that we hoiked ourselves up the M6/M74 etc to visit the outlaws in Bonnie Scotland.

We planned a week of nothing, and that's exactly what we did! I do believe we may have left the house a couple of times. Here you have the evidence - this is us wandering to the garden centre (round the corner). It had been raining but the sun was shining and I saw some leaves with drops of water reflecting in the sunlight. I tried to take an arty farty pic of them. Not sure if I got the focus quite right...but you get the idea!

We did a drive along a couple of nearby Lochs. Loch Earn and Loch Tay - the road alongside Loch Earn afforded us this beautiful view that had us hankering back to our NZ trip in 2007.

Needless to say, the hospitality afforded us by our hosts was second to none - mega food, biccies (home-made of course), wine, and firewood for Dan to burn! A perfect combination for R&R.

The only trauma in an otherwise perfect week was the fact that Michelle had been having a few 'heart flutters' where her heart rate would shoot up very high for an hour or so and then return to normal. This had happened a few years ago but seemed to have returned and happened on a couple of days whilst we were there. (The stress of us being there taking its toll, clearly!)

On the Friday, she went into work as usual, and the palpitations started again, this time continuing for several hours. She works in the local surgery, so, having mentioned it to one of the doctors, they sent her straight up to the hospital.

A million tests were done, and she was kept in overnight. The good news is that, apart from the rapid heart beat, her heart is as fit as a fiddle. Some tablets have been administered which *should* sort out the palpitations also. Fingers crossed.

Son of Cedric - "Spiros"

Cedric's love child is living outside the lounge window.


He's called "Spiros" and Dan has been catching flies and putting them on his web for his tea.

Yum.

TOM!

Aghhhhhh! Tom Jones. In concert. Liverpool Arena. October 17th.


I'm not even going to try and describe how good it was. A reviewer on the Liverpool Echo summed it up nicely:

"...The atmosphere truly was electric, and as be roared out The Green, Green Grass Of Home and Delilah it was somewhere between pop concert and football match, complete with Mexican waves.

With excellent support from up-and-coming soul diva Florence Rawlings, Jones served up what was surely one of the best gigs the arena has ever seen, and certainly one of the most appreciated.."

(Rest of the article here)

All I know is that it was better than any of his previous concerts I'd been to (several!) and they were dammned fantastic! We were hoarse from screaming. Pictures here on our Picasa Album.


The Ladies


So, Tom, we'll see you next time!

PS Thanks for the lift Emmanuele!

More Needlework Action

Well, the sewing is coming along nicely! I'd picked it up after a bit of a hiatus when we were in Scotland a few weeks ago. Michelle was doing loads of knitting for the new members of the family, Dan was playing with the fire, and I was sewing.

This is the status as of last night...



It's a bit difficult to see what's been done (and of course the bottom half is rolled into the frame so you can't see it) but the next pic is with the light behind and the flash off so you can see an outline of the stitching!

Since taking the pic, I've also completed some more of the thin lines which outline the leaves in the middle. I really want to finish the lines because it's quite hard to stitch straight lines - I prefer colouring in the in-between bits!

You can see the progress from the very 1st stitch, here on my Picasa Webalbums.

Pork Pie of Lurve

Dan blobbed a bit of brown sauce on a mini Melton Mowbray pork pie last night and look how it turned out...


He couldn't have done it better if he tried!

Old Trafford & Oscar

A couple of weekends ago, Scotty rang Dan up to see if he was free on the Saturday afternoon. He was. Would he like to go and see ManU at Old Trafford? He Would. Would he like to use Scotty's friend's season tickets? Definitely!

I was also invited (there were 2 tickets) but I was going to see Tom Jones (more about that later)so Dan invited Irv to go with him.

This gave use the opportunity to go and visit little Oscar and say hello! He's a lovely round bouncing baby now. Not as chubby as he was (pity, because I like them round!) because he's starting to crawl, but he's nearly standing (if you support his arms) and he's going to be all over the place soon!!!

Here are another couple of pictures on our Picasa album - Album No 2

This is a gorgeous bouncing vid of him...(I can't turn it - sorry!)

Isn't he cute?

Catching up...again...and Portrush...again!

My lovely friend Emma wrote recently of blogging and creativity gremlins and I definitely think I've been suffering them of late. Dan and I have both been quite stressed and whereas I would normally be blogging about things to relive the stress...this has been almost too much to blog about. Lots of it is work related. No let me be honest...ALL of it is work related. I know some of our colleagues read our blogs, and some of our colleagues on the customer side too, and so it'd not be a good think to 'give out' about them (as they say in Ireland) if they're likely to be reading it!

So, apologies for the radio silence. It's been very necessary. So, but after a day or 2 away, the stress levels have reduced enough to start writing about some of the recent fun things we've been up to (oh yeah, just because we've been stressed doesn't mean the fun stuff has stopped, it just means that we do it more manically, and then don't write it up afterwards!)

So I'm sitting here in Belfast International Airport after having had a lovely relaxed weekend in Portrush with Scotty and Michele. It's Monday night – well 5pm, and we've been here in NI since Thursday. A lovely loooooong weekend. And it has felt like AGES that we've been here.

We got here Thursday night and were in the Harbour Bar by 9pm. Sat down by 9:10. The food was as good as ever! The rest of the evenings drinking continued back home. Champagne (well it was Michele's birthday) wine, and beer. Te pics are us trying on Michele's new specs. I think we look good!

I think there was a 4 in the time when we finally turned in! Weeeeeeell, we'd not seen each other for months! There was a lot to catch up on.

The lateness of Thursday night meant that Friday was nice and quiet; subdued, if you will. A new tea room was explorerd – Leona's – very very good – and we pootled over to Coleraine to look for a new Freeview box; the night before had seen some sort of power surge which had blasted the existing Freeview box and killed the internet router. There was, at one point, the suggestion that I might have to survive a weekend without t'interwebz.

Argggggggghhhhhhhhh. That was not part of the arrangement!!!

Fortunately with a bit of gratuitous setting of, erm, settings, on the router, and the ringing up for password type things, Scotty heroically reconnected us to the outside world. Not that it made me do any blogging, mind. I was just, then, able to update my facebook & twitter status and read and comment on those of others. This is the stuff of which relaxed weekends are made!!!

Friday being a bit of a washout, Saturday dawned bright and early with the promise of sunshine, general chilling out at home, and no hangovers!

To be honest, sitting here looking back, I'm not sure I can exactly recall the exact order of the day...I know there was general ooohing and ahhhhing over the track at Abu Dhabi whilst watching the GP Qualifiers. I know the boys went off to town to find a pub which showed the footy. Michele went off for a facial and massage - a birthday prezzie from her sisters. I fell asleep on the couch watching Miss Marple. It was all go!

When Michelle came back from the facial experience, we went off in search of the chaps – they were not at the Harbour Bar (a concept I can hardly get my head round, in Portrush) but we managed to find them anyway. They were scoffing chicken burgers and the BIGGEST chunky chips you've ever seen! Oh, and drinking Guinness. Apparently they been going steady and drinking shandies before we got there. It's another concept I can hardly get my head round whilst in Portrush.

We put things right by heading on to the Harbour Bar for the 2^nd footie match of the day and after a further couple of pints each, we decided to eat in the Wine Bar (sort of still part of the HB but upstairs in a different building!)

The food was (is) sooooooo good – very reasonably priced and excellent. The tobacco onions are to die for. We were done reasonably early – before 9, and wandered home along the seafront, getting the full benefit of the negative ions being blasted off the Atlantic.

As we all had seen fit to bring champers & cava with us, both pink and white, we seemed to have a lot of it left...oh what a pity, we had to drink some of it!!! So a few bottles were consumed in front of some rather uninspirational Jonathan Ross and Saturday night TV in general.

Sunday dawned early (for me) and I did have some initial thoughts about going and getting the car which we'd left down at the Harbour Bar the previous night. However it was completely chucking it down. So I thought sod that...I'll wait until the rain eases off before going. Unfortunately it was an horrendous day – and the weather only got worse. Dan nearly drowned going across the road to the garage/supermarket to get nibblies and something fr tea, and when Scotty and Michele walked down to the HB for the car in late afternoon, they got completely drenched and had to stay for a hot port!

Another cozy night (with chille con carne a la LizaDan) in was spent...recouping on our lost sleep and building up our 'chill points' by general chatting away (Dan, Scotty), surfing t'webz (Me), and snoozing in front of the fire (Mich).

Monday was mostly taken up with the house 'putting to bed' activities which are necessary when you know the house may not be occupied for some time. Cleaning, washing, tidying, a trip to the dump for the rubbish and a random old telly belonging to Michele's bro-in-law, and so we soon found we found ourselves travelling back down the M2 after a quick stop in Leona's tea room for a farewell slice of victoria sponge!

A quick pitstop over at the Kanes, in order to pick up Mervin so he could drop us off at the Airport (and get his car back, thanks Mr & Mrs K for the car loan!) and it was 4pm, and we were at the airport, which is where you find me now, blogging (yay!) at Gate 16, at 7:24 waiting for our flight to board. Scotty & Michele have already landed at LHR and picked up their luggage. They are probably half way down the A3 as we speak.