Christmas holiday pictures

Snow Pictures

Snow it is

The snow came down last night, in what the media has called the big chill part 2, and from this morning the snow has continued to fall quite heavily. Forecasts saw that the snow will fall tonight and into tomorrow. Its a bit exciting!

ITS COLD.

You can't really see but the temperature on my car says -8.5 degreeds celcius, and that was at 9:00 in the morning. As I write this the temperature has climbed to -6.5'C.The cold snap that we are having looks like it will last for the rest of the week looks like I will be shivering for a little while still.

Ewe wouldn't believe it!

The temperature has really dropped today and the snow has started to fall. It has been falling for about 2 hours steadily at work and it looks like it may have set in. Tomorow we will probably wake up to a white landscape.

Goo goo dolls

Last night we went off to Bristol to see the Goo Goo Dolls. We had been very slack months ago when the tickets originally came out, but very lucky last week when we were able to get a couple of tickets from Ebay, and at cost price as well. We hit a bit of traffic on the way into Bristol but arrived with plenty of time and also managed to catch the whole of the intro band, I even managed to catch a beach ball which they threw into the crowd. We later cashed the ball in for a free CD.
When goo goo dolls came on later, the crowd went crazy especially when they played some of their most popular songs, including Iris, Name and also Broadway lights. I was really suprised when the band introduced one of their first hits which was over 15 years old. A great fun night and only a bit tired today.

Foggy day.

The dog was quite thick this morning and for the second day in a row I had to clear the ice from my windscreen. It was nearly ten o'clock before the fog finally lifted and I saw this interesting sight. The windmills looked eerie jutting out above the fog, not spinning, standing stock still in the landscape. After I looked a little further I noticed one without its wings and another weirdly spinning in the still air.

Rally Wales

Went and looked at the rally stage that was supposed to be around the bay, but didn't really get to see much at all. There were however a few of the cars parked around so that we could have a look. Sebastian Loeb, the current champion, had a car down there. It was real cool, we got to have a look around the car but we couldn't get in, which was a shame. Today however we passed all the cars coming back from the special stage. We even saw Loeb's car again.

Baack at home

After a week working away from home in Leicester I am finally home. Basically planning management decided to send 14 fitters away to work out of head office for the week and to accompany them, so as to not place too much burden upon the leicester staff, I was also sent along. The week started a bit hectic and not much was done but as the week progressed we got a bit more organised and the end of the week came around quite fast. I have enormuos respect for anybody that week in wee out works from a hotel room as it was quite boring. Work, back to the hotel, have a shower, get dinner, sit around for a couple of drinks then it is ten o'clock and time I went to bed. I am glad that the wee is over.

Ultra marathon.

This is the finish line for the half marathon that I completed last weekend. I finished in 1 hour 46 min and 26 seconds. Quite an achievement that I am really proud of doing. In the lead up I was also able to raise over my target of 200 pounds which will go to a good cause.

A Couple of Movies

Here are a couple of movies I took the other day when we were kite boarding down at the Heath Park. They are on youtube so you can check them out;


Me Kiteing; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ILnSUGnVu8

Go have a look.

Thinking inside the box

It is a nice sunny day with no wind so today I felt a bit creative. As I could not in and fly my fantastic new kite I decided to become a bit creative. There used to be a rather sad looking piece of dirt next to the paving, so I decided to build a raised garden bed to plant some autumn plants in. First stop was the hardware where I got some lengths of decking for the sides, some posts for stakes and some screws for holding it all together. So I cut a couple of stakes and bashed them in before cutting and screwing the timber sides into position. I lastly made a final piece to in on the rear to keep the fist away from the neighbours walk before finally filling with dirt from the old potatoe sacks. Done and dusted. Now just need to plant.

Funky red tomato.

The second variety of tomatoes have started to ripen! They are a bit slower than the other variety but they are a bit larger and longer and I think that they will taste a bit better than the other ones. I am glad that they have finall started to ripen as the weather has already started to get a bit cooler, I thought that they would run out of time.

Second potatoe harvest

It was not as good as the first harvest but we got 10 potatoes from 2. I think that the small potatoes that I planted must not have grown at all. But we still got some Mighty potatoes. Next crop will be the onions.

Garden Reaping

Gardening is fun!

It is harvesting time for us in our tiny plot of soil in our pots. So far I have collected two ripe tomatoes, that tasted totally tasty with my breakfast today, and while we were sitting outside we both got a bit impatient with the potatoes so we decided to have a look. All the plants had died off so it would be now or never if we were to reap the rewards of our harvest. I turned the growing bag over and spilled the soil containing our nuggets (potatoes) onto the pavers so we could have a propper rumage around. It was at this point that Sarah let out a squeal of dellight. Eureka! We had a potato.

After going throught the whole bag we ended up with almost 30 potatoes of varying size and this is only one of the two bags that we were growing. It was really rewarding to have something after all this time. You can't see them growing like the tomatoes but that made it much better after the discovery. So now we just need somebody to come over and eat all our potatoes, as the reason we planted them in the first place was because we hadn't eaten all the ones we had before. Want to come ove for some hot chips?

Football on Saturday

We went to watch mark's football team, Gillingham, play against Hereford at Hereford today. The match ended nil all but was a good match. We got a spot right on the fence about 1 metre away from the pitch. Mark sent me a picture from his local newsletter about his football team and we managed to get ourselves into the picture. Can you spot me?

Hint, we are in the front on the right next to the man with the grey jumper.

First onions?

Well I pulled up a couple of onions from the pots in the backyard and they appear to be onions, if you could call them that. They were a bit on the wee side, especially compared to the garden I saw today. This dude had a bed of onions that were all larger than cricket balls. So next time I will be sure to plant the onions at the correct time of the year. And also in bigger pots.

Awesome van shelf

Last weekend I got myself in order and made this little shelf for the van. It folds out so that there is a little shelf to put things on like plates or drinks. It was really satisfying making it, using my hands and also doing some woodwork.

The garden growing,

Here are some pictures of the garden as it has been growing over our summer. The tomatoes are going good, the capsicum's are filling out the the petunias are starting to almost take over.

Camping in the Gower

After a morning of lazing about on Saturday, Sarah came home form errands and encouraged me to go camping in the gower for the night. We quickly packed up and headed off to the Gower, hoping for a campsite nearest to Roshilly but when we arrived there it turned out that the campsite and the carpark were full. So we turned around and headed off to try and find another campsite. We ended up finding one the next beach over. It was really quiet and turned out to be a rather nice campsite. The fields were lush grass and there was not that many other campers there. With the sun setting really late and the light hanging around till nearly half ten at night we sat around and cooked dinner before lazing around our little fire pit.

Friday.

Had a lot of driving today in my company car. It turned out that today my satnav decided to send of across some really different routes. The first time the nav sent me over one of the passes between valleys the cloud descended so that the visability was down to about 100 M. It was really cool. Later on in the afternoon when I had decided to head home the satnav sent me along the route which took me along this single track road. This is where I took this picture. There was a huge slag pile of coal in the left of the picture.

Woo hoo!

Yay, no more work for a while. So now we are on the train heading to London to catch Bon Jovi, live in concert in the O2 arena. From there we have a day in London before flying out to australia! Not long now till we will be there.

Powderfinger farewell tour.

I just got out of the powderfinger gig in bristol, and it was AWESOME! It just makes me a bit sad that they are breaking up. They played a great set list and they had to come back out to play My happiness.

Saturday.

Today the day dawned grey and unimpressive so we slept in then decided to go for a drive to another town. We ended up in Port Eynon and did a little souvenir shopping before chowing down on fish and chips in the van. With lunch over we headed off to Llangennith where we hit Rhosili beach and checked out the surf. Being both warm weather water people Sarah and I decided to just watch and fly our kite. There was just enough wind to fly our kite but not enough for the land kiter to get his power kite and mountain board going.