I don't know if anyone visits here anymore. Someone may still have it on a feed reader I suppose. My last attempt at blogging failed miserably. But I've started again, and this time it feels right.

I'm now in The Land of Sticks

If you do visit please leave a comment so I know you've been.

Blogger is weighing me down. I want to post but feel the need for a fresh start. The cats are old now they're no longer manic, just tired and a little grumpy... like me.

If you care to follow me I'm moving here celeste creates.

This blog is sadly neglected, but I really want to kick some life back into it. Things have been happening which need documenting.

First and biggest, is:



I'm getting married!

Porl asked me on my birthday last year, but we didn't tell anyone as we wanted to have some idea about what we wanted to do before we involved other people.
Months later and we still haven't a clue so thought if we tell people we might be inspired.
It worked. We've decided we want to get married this summer. We're going to see the registrar tomorrow.
It won't be a big affair, after 14 years it'd be a bit silly. Also we have a very close, but very small circle of friends and we're only asking direct family members. We're going to the local registry office, onto a nice pub for a meal. Then maybe a night out in Manchester.

Bryher and my nieces will be Bridesmaids. I tried to explain to her today about weddings. I said there would be a party, and me, her and my nieces would dress up like princesses (she into dressing up and princesses at the moment.) I asked her what colour dress she'd like. She said "Pink". Then said my youngest niece should wear orange, my eldest niece blue, and I should wear red. I suggested silver shoes, but she said we should all have red shoes.

Needless to say I'll not be taking the advice of a 3 year old who doesn't know all her colours yet.

In other news in the months since I last updated....

Last October I was chatting to my boss, she's very slim (in my eyes, but I realise now that doesn't matter.) She signed up to Slimming World to shed a few lbs. Apparently when she was younger she was a lot bigger but lost it and kept it off through Slimming World, but a long stint of travelling meant she'd put a few lbs back on so she wanted to lose them again.
I've always though diets like Slimming World, Weight Watchers, weren't designed for me because I'm vegetarian, I'd tried SW years ago but they didn't include Quorn back then and I was stuck for ideas so gave up after a few weeks but what my boss was eating looked great. We talked about how the diet works, and the next day I signed up to my local group.

I'm now 3 stone lighter, and 4 dress sizes smaller. I hit target a few weeks ago. Now the hard work starts, keeping it off!

This is the picture I've been carrying in my purse for months. On it I've written "I'm doing this to be healthy and happy for her".


This photo was taken last June, and I didn't have the energy or inclination to run around the beach with her.

This is me now, desperately in need of a haircut.



So that's the main news. There are other things to tell, but they'll wait till another day.
Hopefully I'll be back tomorrow with news of a date!

I keep thinking about posting here... but thinking and doing aren't the same.
I've taken a load of pictures though so maybe, just maybe...

But first I have to get the house tidied. Bryher has discovered my bead stash so some reorganising/childproofing is required. I also have to sort out the garden. I managed the front at the weekend, not an easy task. It's not huge but if it was any steeper mountaineering equipment would be required.

I'm quite pleased that I've not tackled the back garden yet because it means I'll be able to take part in the Seed Swap being run over on http://marmaladekiss.blogspot.com/. I love swapping seeds and plants with people. It reminds me of that person when I see the plant. When we moved here the garden was mostly grass with very few plants. Now the back garden has no grass, half deck and a lot of plants. Most of the plants are ones I've got from my Mum, but she's had 30+ years of collecting them from people. Among my favourites are Mr Heath's Periwinkle, Joan's Rose and Peonies from Grandad and Mill Street.

So if you fancy having a reminded of a blogger in your garden then sign up over at Marmalade Kiss.

I posted this as a draft for my reference ages ago, but I've been speaking to someone about it so figured I may as well put it online.

This list was published by The Big Read a few years ago as the 100 Greatest Novels. Apparently the average person has read only 6 of the books on the list.

Bold = Read

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zifon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factoy - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Anyone who has seen the wall of books in my living room (and the 5 sets of books shelves elsewhere in the house) will agree I read a little more than the average person. I've read 49 so far. There's a few on my bookshelves that I've not got around to yet and there's a few others that I really want to read but haven't spotted in a Charity shop yet.