Friday 31 January 2014

Amsterdam Day 4

On our fourth and final day in Amsterdam we spent most of our time wandering around the western canal rings. We browsed through the boutiques, sampled cheeses at the Cheese Museum, and dined on the biggest pancakes at the Pancake Bakery - which just happened to overlook the smallest house in Amsterdam. We did the mandatory visit to the Ann Frank museum, but the queue was hours long so we admired the wall plaque and continued to mooch. Typically we discovered a load of places that we would have loved to spend more time exploring, we did a lot of walking and stopped for many a drink to soak up as much of the culture (and people watching) as possible. It was kind of a weird day because there was still so much to see and do, but we were kind of glum because we knew we were leaving that day too. It definitely helped that we could leave our bags at the hotel & collect them just before we had to leave. Annoyingly we still had 4kg left on our baggage allowance so we could have bought loads of cheese!


Rich and I are itching to book another holiday. With a little help from Pinterest I think we'll be making a bucket list very soon.

Sarah
xx

Monday 27 January 2014

What room can be eaten? A mushroom!

One of my favourite things about the countryside is when you come across mushrooms / toadstools / fungi. I have many memories from my childhood of going mushroom hunting in the fields and National Trust grounds near my home, usually with my Dad or as a family, it was great. Armed with a Readers Digest guide, we picked the edible 'shrooms and left the rest. It's strange how much I love to pick them even though I hate the taste of them. While I've been cat sitting at my Dads there have been a variety of mushrooms, toadstools and fungi appearing in the garden and the woodland around the house, it's been pretty great. You've got to love the variety of colours, plus when you find one that's fallen over it's like a big party and all the bugs have been invited. 

 Toadstool or Nipple?

I originally wrote this post back in the autumn and forgot all about it, but these little shrooms were too cool not to share, well to me anyway!

Sarah
xx

Friday 24 January 2014

Pomps Patch #5

Is anyone else getting bored of this weather? I can't believe we can go from having horrendous, heavy rain one day and then a blue sky paradise the next. Anyway, on Sunday as the sun was shining and the birds were singing we threw on our wellies and stomped through the mud to our plot. There are some parts that are still too water logged to do anything too, but we were determined to sow our first load of seeds and so we got to work. While Rich raked over the beds, I pulled up a few plants that had been eaten and died off, we'd left them while we worked out what they were but they haven't shown any signs of life so out with the old and in with the new!

We're quite lucky and already have a bed of Asparagus, Strawberries and Rhubarb leftover from the last owner which are ticking along nicely. I've been going crazy in Poundland and Wilkos, buying a variety of seeds and fruit bushes, so this weekend we made a start on getting them in the ground. We have a whole bed of broad beans (I could eat a plate full on their own) and half a bed of onions which will be joined by garlic next month. I have 6 raspberry, 3 blueberry, 3 gooseberry and 3 redcurrent bushes that will be going in this weekend, along with a pear tree, and the cauliflower and tomatoes have been sown indoors, so I'm looking forward to watching their progress while I do my washing up!

I'm hoping that we'll have a dry day or two again this weekend, I desperately want to get the last few things in the ground for this month and make a start on tidying the other side of the plot up. There are all sorts of pieces of rotten carpet, material, and other debris all over the place, so with a bit of luck we can get it all to the tip and make room to clear the last of the weeds in time for a bonfire the following week. As I was pulling some carpet up on Sunday I uncovered a family of frogs and toads all snuggled up together, so we're hoping that by this weekend they may have moved on or we'll have to re-home them. 



I've been spending my evenings making the most of my christmas presents and totally geeking out over planning our plot and what we're going to grow, I'm in stationary heaven!

Hope you're all having a great week.

Sarah
xx

Monday 20 January 2014

Three horns never play with long necks!

For a long time now I've been wanting to add some more tattoos to my dinosaur sleeve. I've had my triceratops for a couple of years now and she was definitely looking lonely, so when my lovely friend and tattooist, Lauren Gow,  posted that she would be doing a guest spot at Glory Bound Tattoo studio in Exmouth I got straight in there and booked an appointment. As a big fan of the Land Before Time I've been basing my choice of dinosaurs around that, so for my second tattoo I decided to get Little Foot with a couple of tree stars. If you live in the Cheltenham area you should definitely check Lauren and the rest of the guys at No Regrets out, and if you've never seen the film before you HAVE to watch it!!!


Please excuse my massive arm, it was seriously swollen after 3 hours of tattooing. I can't wait to add a T Rex and Pterodactyl later in the year.

Sarah
xx

Tuesday 14 January 2014

Friends

WARNING... this post will contain a nice juicy rant!!


Last week I met up with two of my very lovely old work colleagues for a long overdue catch up. We talked and laughed about all things that had been going on in our lives and how sometimes you realise that there are people in your life who make you happy every time you see them but there are also those who quite frankly bring you down. They may not mean to or even know that they're doing it, but their own negativity or personality traits can leave you feeling deflated after spending any amount of time with them. So you're left with the conundrum of continuing the friendship and feeling emotionally exhausted after each rendezvous, or cutting them from you life, a little bit or completely. It's a tough decision to make, especially if it's a friendship that you've invested years into, but at the end of the day we all grow up, we change and evolve, and the common ground that you once shared may no longer be common at all.

When we leave school, a job, uni, there are those friends that no matter how far away you live from each other or how often you see them, when you do it's like you were never apart and the conversation doesn't stop flowing. As I grow up I find I'm becoming far more selective with who I choose to spend my time and energy with. There are friends who I saw 5 days a week and loved spending time with who simply cannot be bothered, so why do we (my group of friends and I) continue to invite them to every gathering, and then feel annoyed because they make up their excuses? We make sure we all get together at least 4 times a year, because our friendships are important to us, and it's just so much bloomin' fun. Then there are the friends who turn up for said gatherings, but then ditch us because there are men to be chased.
For me, it's time to move on and walk away, if they were that good a friend they would make even the slightest bit of effort towards our friendship, rather than fob us off with excuses or if anything with a pulse walks past the bar.

One thing I love about blogging is meeting people that you share interests with, surly it can only be a good thing to have people you can share the things you mutually enjoy with? Apparently not. I recently 'lost' a friend who no longer wanted anything to do with me because I 'copied' her. At the ripe age of 26 I thought the whole 'copying' thing was left behind in primary school 15 years ago, but apparently not. One of the reasons our friendship continued was due to mutual interests, but apparently to my friend that meant we could like the same things but not buy them. When I bought something she had (we both love vintage), the bitching began all over Facebook and Instagram. I couldn't believe it, we like the same things so why wouldn't we both buy them? It seems so ridiculous and childish, but has made me really think about our 'friendship'. Did I really want to be friends with someone who wanted to control my life like that, and bad mouth me to our friends if she didn't get her own way? Not even a little bit.

So from now on I will be investing my time and energy into those true friends, the ones who make your face hurt from laughing so hard, who have your back no matter what, and the one's you would do anything for to stop them from hurting. Goodbye to the users, the friends who drain the happiness out of you with their negativity, and the ones who just can't be bothered anyway.

Thanks for listening to my winging, sometimes you just need to get it off your chest.

Sarah
xx

Monday 13 January 2014

Christmas

I can't believe Christmas has been and gone and we're already almost half way through January, madness. Before the year runs away with me I thought I'd share some of my highlights from Christmas 2013. This year I spent Christmas eve at Rich's house with his family, and woke up there on Christmas day to get the festivities up and running. I was well and truly spoiled with treats from him and his family; a new dress, lots of allotment related goodies, a mahoosive Yankee candle, a wicker basket and some pretty amazing flamingo lights, to name a few. Then I donned the christmas jumper and headed to my Dad's for a quiet day with him, his partner and my brother. Very relaxed, lots of food and even more presents, win!

On Boxing day the whole gang gathered at my Dads for another fun day. My favourite thing about Christmas by far was seeing how much Jack, my nephew, enjoyed it. When I think back to his first Christmas he pretty much slept the whole time, but now at 2 years and 2.5 months, he was bloomin' loving it. He is the biggest fan of all things farm and train related, what that boy couldn't tell you about tractors isn't worth knowing. So we got him a huge John Deer tractor, his face lit up with excitement and he had a good play with it before moving on to his next present and saying 'and that one' ha. That little monkey is an absolute corker. 



I finally faced my fears and got to grips with my sewing machine so that I could make Alice (James' girlfriend) and Grace (her twin sister) these Flamingo cushions, they both love a tropical print, they loved them!

I'm so glad we got to have my Nan out for Boxing day, the whole day was a bit too tiring and overwhelming for her and I don't think she'll be up to coming again. We'll definitely all cherish these memories.

Hope you all had a fab time and stayed safe over the festive season. Now bring on spring!!!

Sarah
xx

Friday 10 January 2014

Amsterdam Day 3

I just realised that I had two days left of our Amsterdam holiday, all typed up but I'd forgotten to share so here goes...

On our third day in Amsterdam we did one of the things I'd been looking forward to most... hired bikes! One of the best things about Amsterdam is even when you have no idea where you're going, if you follow a canal you'll usually end up where you want to be. We'd made a list of the places we wanted to see that were a bit further away from our hotel so cycling would save our feet a bit. We started off by heading to the eastern side of the city, going back to some of the areas we spotted from the canal cruise, particularly the Waterlooplien Flea market. This was my favourite market of all. It was a mix of new, second hand/vintage and bicycle accessories and repairs, all of which are my kind of things. I could have spent a small fortune, particularly on an original gramophone and taxidermy fox, but one the highlights for me was the dog in the pram, amazing!!

The dog in the pram was the most adorable thing I've ever seen!
 
Isn't this the best gramophone you've ever seen? It has the hmv dog on it and everything! And don't even get me started on the fox. If my suitcase had been big enough both of them would have been coming home with me.
 
Just around the corner from these beautiful buildings is the Red Light district. Being a bit of a prude I found it kind of uncomfortable, comical but uncomfortable. We were wandering around, not really sure what to expect, and then looked up to a street of glass doors with a bunch of nearly naked ladies dancing and trying to entice some customers, I didn't know where to look, ha! I'd heard a lot about it but didn't expect it to be quite so open, or for it to be so normal for men to just walk in and out of their 'booths'. I don't think I'll be trading in my grandad cardigans for some latex anytime soon!
 
 

We ended our day of cycling in the Vondelpark, soaking up the sun, doing some people watching and admiring the water fountains.

Thanks for stopping by.

Sarah
xx