Easter Weekend and All Those Bank Holidays...

Have been enjoying the time off work following the Easter Weekend and the extra bank holiday this Friday for the Royal Wedding. For the first time I booked the extra days off in between giving me a nice long break away from the daily grind of work. With Julia being home too, her Uni holiday was better timed around Easter than the local schools, its been good being at home with her again. Mind she only has about 8 days in total until she packs up for good for the first year so she's looking forward to that.

We've done some retail therapy while she's been home, shopping for prom dresses for her summer ball. Bit of a headache really as there's lots of styles she don't like and not many that she does. Like me she's not really a dressy girl, more jeans and leggings, so it's proved a bit of a challenge. Not made any easier by the fact that we printed out lots of possibilities off the web for our trip to Bluewater only to find that most of the shops didn't stock those items anyway. Ended up back in reliable Maidstone where we ordered one and bought another to give her the option between them. Suffice to say that we got there in the end and a prom dress hangs in my wardrobe awaiting it's debut. On the other hand I had to shop for another pair of shoes and sandals after both are pretty much falling apart. I HATE buying footwear of any description and Julia will vouch for the fact that I probably tried on every possible shoe/sandal combination that Bluewater's more old fashioned shops had to offer. Ended up over Maidstone in some new shoe store where they display various styles and then all the sizes are there in boxes for you to try on yourself without the need to ask an assistant first. Much more my style of shopping as I'm so fussy about comfort that I know the shop person would be well fed up keep getting out all sorts of wrong 'uns in my search for shoe Nirvana. Sandals were from BHS in the end and again were probably the last style I tried on. All that remains is to see if they are as comfortable in real every day wear as they were in the shops, something that sadly is not usually the case when I buy footwear. Julia put on a very brave face as she sat on various seats waiting for me to trawl round the shop trying everything on, kind of made up for me waiting for her to try on prom dresses so I think on this occasion we were pretty even.

She's had some uni work to do so we've not done much else yet but might pop over to Leeds Castle at the weekend. Bought myself a new tripod which I'd like to try out so that will be a good opportunity.

Not really looking forward to getting back to work next week, the time goes so quickly, but our summer break won't be long coming round and where we are staying is fully paid up now so looking forward to seeing the place in the flesh and hoping it lives up to all the photos we've seen of the place. It has a sea view so at least we won't be stuck out in the boonies again this year!

Texas Moon Fancy Dress - Hawaiian

This is a collage of some of the images taken of us at the Texas Moon 18th Birthday Party in April 2011. This year's theme was Hawaiian as you can preobably guess and Julia and I pushed the boat out this year by buying our outfits online well before the big day. The sunnies came from Primark but without my varifocals I couldn't really see anything with them especially when we got to the club and the lights were dimmed! The other good folks in these pictures are Julia's other half James and his family and of course my Dad and step-mum Margaret.

It was a good evening all round, most people came along in fancy dress or at least wearing bright colours and flower garlands. And the gazebo went up again over our table along with the hawaiian wall posters. We took along a table palm tree and with Julia's coconut cup and my tikki mug we were well into the spirit of things ;-)

Arty Crafty

Was having a play around at the weekend with Microsoft’s montage program which I had forgotten about since buying the new laptop. James’s mum Annie reminded me about it when she brought along to the club, some photos of her and her sisters that she had run through the program over the weekend. I first came across it when James used it to make a montage of photos of him and Julia for a song CD case that he was preparing for Julia. He used the trial version which leaves a watermark over the final image but for the princely sum of £18 you can buy the full version which is what I ended up doing. It’s a bit tricky to get used to in that you don’t have a lot of control over the final montage apart from ranking the top two images, selecting the level of overlap and the number of images used, the program decides what goes where based on its or your ranking. However it produces pretty neat results and if you try out face detection (there is a manual option too where you can draw a box around a face or faces) it will then try not to overlap faces or important details. I know that as an avid user of Photoshop it shouldn’t be too hard to create my own montages but as with all things, it’s easier said than done and this little program does it a lot quicker. You can save which ever creations it makes or just keep selecting “Create” again to get another combination.

I also got carried away making some arty pictures out of a few photos I took of some ice patterns that were on Julia's car the other morning. The car had a leaf-like pattern of ice crystals all over the black roof which looked quite interesting so I grabbed my trusty Panasonic and took a few snaps before the sun started to melt it. Of course the final images bear no resemblance to the original shots as is usually the case when I get carried away in Photoshop but I think they look good nevertheless.

Looking Back...

As I was walking home last night I passed a young girl "scootering" home from school with her Mum and a baby brother or sister in tow. Her uniform told me she was in Horsted school so at least no older than Junior level and it got me thinking back to my time when I was her age. Life was idyllic, we didn't even have homework then like they do now, life was one long round of playtime and endless fun. No worries or responsibilities, just lots of time out playing in the fresh air and making the most of being a kid. Long holidays that stretched out before us like a lifetime and plenty of them. We'd spend Saturdays at Nan & Grandad's and Sundays out with my other Nan and Mum & Dad. All sorts of special people there to make us feel warm and safe. Life fit for a child just as it should be. Would I want to go back to then if I could? Maybe, sometimes, just for a short while, see those special people again who are no longer here and leave life feeling a little more empty now. Forget for a little while the worries of work, paying bills and the rest of the baggage that we generally carry round as adults. Maybe thats why retirement seems such an attractive place to be? It's kind of a second childhood for grown-ups, time (and hopefully money) to do as we please again, the only downside being older, not necessarily wiser and wondering if our health will still be good enough to allow us to do all the things we put off "till we retire".

Winter Back Again?

Getting well fed up by now waking to fog every day so far this week, it's not too cold really but cooler than it has been of late. Where's all the sunshine gone? We've been spoiled of late with bright, sunny, Spring days and now it feels as though we've been plunged back into Winter :-( Mind at least we've not got snow, they were forecasting it for Scotland over the weekend. Thought we were supposed to have a week of drizzle so with that in mind the fog is a better option as far as I'm concerned, I don't get wet in the fog!
Still the daffs are slowly beginning to come out, we have loads planted on a road island opposite the old Mid-Kent College site, the crocuses have been there a while already but the daffs flowering is a sure sign that Spring is on its way! Bought some tulips the other weekend at Asda when we went to get some flowers to take up the crematorium for my Nan's birthday. They were really nice indoors, flowered for the best part of a week and cheered the place up a bit. I'm not known for my green fingers when it comes to plants so we don't have any live ones indoors, strictly dried or silk only.
The downside to Spring and hence Summer coming of course is the garden... It means I shall be forced to go outside and initially tidy up after the Winter and then keep it tidy over the coming months, not my most favourite of chores let me tell you. Still it does leave one with a sense of achievement when you come indoors after a session and see the lawns looking tidy and less weeds lurking among the plants in the side beds. In my line of work I don't produce anything tangible so to be able to so obviously see the fruits of my labours is a pleasure even if I do balk at going outside in the first place ;-)