Blog problems

 I am not posting for a day or two while Dh tries to sort out what's wrong

Chrisxx

I'd never have thought that!

There hasn't been seating outside Costa for weeks and we've missed it. We always sat outside with Nell, because dogs weren't allowed inside. These days they are welcome, and some days there are several inside, all quiet and wolfing down their puppacinos!!

There was scaffolding up for quite a while, we assumed it was to allow the flats above to be painted. But the scaffolding came down last week and still no seats.

When we were there on Wednesday, we asked were they going to put seats outside again? Jodi who seems to be in charge told us, they were waiting for a firm to clean the awning of gull and pigeon droppings! The scaffolding had been there, so that the poop mess could be cleaned off the building. Evidently the firm contracted to do this had been booked last summer but still hadn't done the awning! 

So one of the problems of being in a seaside town.. Opposite Costa is the old Coop building, now a Pound Shop and they have a hole in the side of their roof overhang and we watch the pigeons fly in and out.

Our dawn chorus at 5 ish is the squawking of gulls!

Isn't the Costa building grand? I think it might have been a bank!

Chrisxx

19 Years and the Girls came too!!

We had this song sung by Dh's twin daughters on our wedding day 29th July 2006. It was a beautiful day and went absolutely perfectly.

The sun shone and I planned it with my best friend's help and we had a wonderful day. After the ceremony, with our 26 guests we sat down to a delicious meal in a restaurant we'd booked in Brentwood.  

I hadn't arranged to have any floral table displays, but my friend convinced me we should. So I went back to the flower shop, three days before the wedding and they were delighted to do them. I left it all up to them and they did us proud. 

I was very surprised and delighted, because they took the flowers to the restaurant, and with the restaurant staff set up all the tables with the beautiful displays. It was amazing, more than I could have hoped for. 

We ourselves,  enjoyed every minute and later our guests joined us at my house in Billericay for the evening, food by Mr Waitrose and a cake by 'him' too. We spent our wedding night there and the next day at 5:30am a taxi took us and the 'girls' (the twins) to the airport where we flew to America. 

Yes, we had a honeymoon with 16 year old twins, ummmm ?? They did have their own room! But apart for America I wouldn't change one thing. It was a perfect day and I married the best man in the world!!

And here we are still very happy 19 years later.

Chrisxx

Thank you,

Thank you for all the messages re:- not being able to access my blog by some people, nice to  know but it doesn't sort it out. 

My IT expert, aka Dh, has checked our anti virus and all is ok.. so I don't know how I can help. 

But nice to know I am still in the blogging world because where else could I post this.......,LOL

Chrisxx

What did I say?

 Thank goodness for this....

I don't know what I've done but I've lost some bloggers that always  used to leave a comment, but no more? I've visited their blogs and left comments, but none from them?

Did I say something they didn't like, or are my posts boring or is it their tastes have changed? Should I apologize or just move on?

Move on I guess, we are all different with different view points and beliefs. What ever I think you should be true to yourself and beliefs.

I have some one who keeps asking me to be 'friends' on FB,  but she blasphemes and I don't like that, so I give her a swerve.. and a blog I've  always read, which was interesting, but her language is 'ripe' so I've stopped visiting that blog. 

I've dropped writing every day, because not a lot has been happening, I'm not going to write about an 'incident' in my life and end it with 'and then I woke up!' Just the sort of ending my year 3 class would write! I'm a better blogger and writer than that I hope?

Today is our last Welsh session, thank goodness because being up showered and breakfasted by 9:30 on a Monday morning has been very hard.. and we've signed up for next year with the same Tutor and at the same time, well we decided it got us going for the week!

Will I ever be able to speak Welsh fluently? I don't know, 'ond dw i eisiau siarad Cymraig felli bydda i dal i ceisio!'

Chrisxx

Yes it is a holiday town

 You know you live in a seaside holiday town, when you have to stop for a line of donkeys lead by a pied ball pony as they cross the road in front of you. 

We weren't fast enough with a camera but they came out of a lane and crossed quite a busy road. All trotting happily behind each other with out a rope between them. They are the beach donkeys and well looked after

They live here in a stable with the field full of buttercups that we frequently pass on our way home from town.

To any one who might suggest that it's cruel to have them giving rides on a hot beach, they do have a shelter to be out of the sun and they look extremely healthy and well looked after. 

The owners have times when you can visit their stables and help feed, care and brush them, for a few pounds. And if you wanted you could help muck out their stables. There are even Christmas visits arranged which are proving quite popular.  When there was carol singing in town, there were two donkeys there looking very Christmassy.

They are very much the face of Porthcawl. When my granddaughter was small, a ride on a donkey was all she ever wanted. 

Chrisxx

An afternoon in the garden.

 Don't you love the quiet rhythm of the days when the sun shines and you feel happy with your world. 

Since 'Lockdown' Dh and I don't rush in the mornings any more. We drink our tea, hot with the news of the day, then breakfast before we shower and dress. Dh always goes first for no particular reason and I read blogs on my laptop, before I shower. Then we have a coffee break, some times quite a long one as we decide what to do or not!

Yesterday after a quick tidy round, a short walk, we had an omlette and salad lunch with our own tomatoes, then I sat in the garden and enjoyed the quiet and the beauty of it all.  

I see this burst of colour from the French doors, to greet me each day.

All our annual flowers I grew from seeds,  potted on and we planted them out together to fill our flower beds. I love Nicotiana and their scent is exquisite.

Lots of dahlia's because I love those too, 

Shasta daisies are the spots of white through several beds, I only thought of spreading them around last autumn, a tip from Monty Don! 

It was very pleasant, I watched several pairs of cabbage white butterflies, doing their 'courtship' twirling around each other, there were even some small brown butterflies. I heard a robin's song and watched a large magpie on a neighbour's extension roof drinking from the guttering, and dodged some wasps! And here once again are my lovely Angels Fishing Rods!

An afternoon to be happy with our lives here in Wales. We don't even mind when it rains, always saying 'at least we're not on holiday!'

Chrisxx

 

An Amazon business in the making!!

 My eldest son loves photography. He was always very artistic at a very early age in school.. He wanted to do art and design in school but, his best subjects were the Sciences, so that's what he did for his 'A' Levels and went to Uni to do Chemical Engineering.

In his second year his exam results weren't too good and he started being really ill. Each time we talked on the phone he kept saying he had a stomach upset. I put it down to the food he was eating.. but by the next year he had lost a lot of weight and I insisted he came home and saw a Dr.. he was diagnosed with Chrohn's disease and he had to drop out of Uni. A year later he had major surgery and his fight to get back to good health started.

By this time I had gone through my divorce and bought my own house. He got an easy job in the town and gradually got well, but he was still very thin. Then he wanted to do his first love, something arty! We found a year's course in photography and I managed to get the money with extra teaching jobs.. he did the follow up year. He was always saying he'd pay me back when he made his first £100,000!

He did several jobs on the way, selling in a big home furnishing store; started his own furniture shops, but with the opening of IKEA his business folded. And then working as technician for a catalogue firm, doing photo shop work, rather boring he said.

So it has taken a few years to do a photography job that pays enough for him to live.. he is now a successful photographer taking photos at race tracks.. motor cycles and racing cars.. but when there was lock down, the work stopped. He got income support but it hardly paid his living expenses.

So he started selling stuff on ebay. First it was just stuff and a couple of old cameras that he no longer used, then he found an auction house that sold old and broken cameras and other stuff, watches and electronic things. 

This has taken off in a big way. He cleans the cameras, gets them working with new batteries and now is making enough money to turn down some photography work he doesn't fancy. Things are really looking up for him. Last week when we talked on the phone, he was complaining that his kitchen was full of boxes that a neighbour had saved for him, for his ebay sales. We laughed and joked that Jeff Bezos had started his Amazon business by selling books from his garage and packed and posted them himself!

But now he has time for some leisure and has joined a photography group that meets up for a walk in different places, to take photographs and then they display them and talk about taking them.. and just chatting in a pub.  He is so much happier and has free time for himself. He might be on the way to getting that £100,000 but I don't want any money from him hearing him happy is more than enough for me and that he is well. 

But he is my entrepreneur and he's very nice with it. 

Chrisxx

Claustrophobic!!

 In  my news feed today I read of a man,  who was wearing a big metal necklace and was sucked into an MRI machine in Nassau.. I'm so glad I didn't see anything like this a few years ago, because I had to have an MRI scan. It was horrible I thought I'd have to press the emergency button to say I wasn't ok after just a few minutes.

The clanking noise was very, very loud so listening to music wasn't possible, but what I hated the most was not doing or listening to anything at all. I thought I'd go mad. That might sound extreme but I was struggling not to panic. Being slid into the opening was horrific, I was a bit claustrophobic and I reckon this procedure has made me worse

So I played word games in my mind, nothing very clever, but naming flowers going through the alphabet, then girl names, boy names and then a list adding an item each time, eg start with ..loaf of bread, add butter, add jam etc.. each time starting over with ..loaf of bread. I think I got to 15 items and then forgot some. 

When a voice came through the head phones .. 'just 6 more minutes Christine, are you alright?' I nearly said 'No' but I stuck it out and it was only 20 minutes altogether, but felt so much longer. I was wet with perspiration when they got me out and I cried and cried with Dh in the little room afterwards. 

Never again, you can't imagine what its like, till you have to have it, I couldn't do it again. Have you had to have one?

Chrisxx

Moon walking!

 If you read anything about keeping healthy as you age they all say exercise and walk. Somebody I know through SW, the slimming group, walks everywhere and she is only a year or two younger than me. She was told by a health adviser.... while you can, walk! So she does. There are several members who tell of doing 10,000 steps each day.. what??? Don't they go to bed? But it seems they wear their watches, step counters,  all the time and only take it off to shower. I don't even remember to put mine on!

 I do acknowledge I need to walk more, but I am paranoid about tripping up so I avoid some paved areas and do as a physiotherapist told me... pick your feet up higher than you think. I sometimes think.. do the moon walk... as I walk along. The main street here in town is pedestrianised, but a lot of the block paving making up the road is broken or dips dangerously, where heavy delivery lorries have driven along, so I am very cautious walking there.

The best places to walk are Shopping Malls, but there aren't any near us. But yesterday I found the perfect place to walk. The new B&M, its instead of Homebase. It is huge, with shelving sited,  so you have to snake around and go down and up different aisles. We went for a new lavatory brush, they didn't have the one I wanted, but I did 25 minutes of walking, albeit slowly. We didn't come away empty handed, and bought a new kitchen compost bin and some teeth interdental brushes. I think this is going to be a weekly place to walk.

We'll still walk along the promenade where there aren't pavers, but not near Booths or Mama Frans, they sell ice cream so I daren't go near them for the obvious reason, too tempting!

Chrisxx