Christmas

Here are some Christmas pictures.
Nic really liked her present.
Saffy in her new collar. She was a lot more excited by the bags of doggy treats though
Here is me opening a present from Brian - very pretty undies!

We had a very nice day. Ate too much of a rather aerobically inclined turkey - had real muscles in his legs, though the breast meat was (actually still is as we have lots left) very tender. I made an Italian nut christmas cake from Delia's new book which is very tasty indeed. We also had lovely cheese. And wine. A good day.

It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas

So having battled my post wedding blues, I've set about trying to feel festive but thus far Christmas cheer has been eluding me. I've got tons on at work, am completely over excited about and therefore distracted by our honeymoon and I'm also really quite skint which never helps when buying lots of lovely presents. In order to combat this I thought that this weekend I'd put our tree up, despite the fact we'll be back in Wales for Christmas day itself. So yesterday I headed out to buy a tree but was really surprised a) by how few there are available this year and b) by how expensive they are! Something about the exchange rate was the only answer I could divulge - has anyone else has this problem? Anyway, I found one that was actually under £20 when I randomly drove past a newsagents of all places.

Great I thought, now the fun can begin. Having got said tree home though I couldn't find our tree holder device, so had to improvise Blue Peter-style with an empty washing powder pot filled with gravel from the garden, which I was pretty pleased with! So with tree up I set about decorating it. After the wedding we have tons of fairy lights as we bought extra to put up at Court Colman. Again, great I thought. Apart from, most of them are broken and of course I didn't check they were working before I wrapped them around the tree :( So I then had to unwrap them upon realising they didn't work and start all over again. Tiresome. But on I go and get on some lights that work, all the baubles, etc until I'm happy with it all. I then make the rookie mistake of turning my back on the damn thing and go into the kitchen, and my home-made tree holding device lets me down and the whole thing falls flat on the floor!!!!

I really was feeling anything other than festive at this point despite my best efforts and those of Bing on the CD player. However, I dusted myself off and did a bit more wedging of the tree with a bit of additional garden gravel, re-applied all the baubles and voila! It's been standing now for about 5 hours so fingers crossed it stays that way over night. I'm sure you'll agree it was a lot of effort for a little tree! But my lights are now twinkling brightly and I have left over wedding candles burning as well for good measure. So mission accomplished, I am actually feeling quite festive now and looking forward to mince pies at Boo's next weekend. We are really looking forward to seeing everyone who is going :)

Love Kate xxxx

Music on a winter's afternoon

We have just had a lovely weekend in Southampton visiting Kieran and Alice. We spent Saturday in nearby Winchester, which is a lovely cathedral city. I managed to buy a few Xmas presents and bizarrely we bumped into a former neighbour's daughter who used to babysit for us. We were just passing the cathedral and there she was. Small world eh?
Alice is in a couple of orchestras and fortuitously we had chosen to come when one of them was holding a concert. It was in a village outside of Southampton called Chandler's Ford where Peggy was always visiting some relative back in the day. We were a little late as the SatNav chose to take us to the village of Easliegh instead. Just when I trust that technology it lets me down. Trev is like an abused wife over it. He refuses to hear criticism of it and always says he must have programmed it wrongly hmmmm.
Anyway we missed most of the Wasps by Vaughn Williams but luckily the hall was such that we could sneak in the back without making too much noise. The programme included Sibelius but the highlight for me was Pictures at an Exhibition. They had got in extra percussionists and a harpist for it and the sound was great. The percussion section was fascinating as they seemed to have to take it in turns to play the gong so they were all swapping places and instruments so the right person was free to play the gong. I am sure there was method in all this. I was very pleased to see also that one of the clarinetist looked as if he had escaped from Pickwick papers. All sideburns. Of course the best section was the violins and the first violin players were subperb!
It was a really lovely concert and I was very impressed. I recommend them if you are ever in the Southampton ares

Back to reality...

...it's amazing how quickly life has returned to normal post-wedding. I have struggled through the past few days really with post-wedding blues and can see why it's the tradition for newlyweds to go on honeymoon straight away because going back to work only 2 days later really sucked.

I have to say a HUGE thank you to everyone who came to the wedding and to everyone who's so generously donated to our Trailfinders list. We've been frankly overwhelmed with the generosity and want to say a big, big thank you. We are sooooo excited about our trip to South Africa - less than a month to go now, whoop! The biggest thank you however has to go to Mum who was a total hero and not only made 110 cupcakes, arranged all the flowers, got up at 5am on the wedding day to try and coax the tiger lillies into opening (which they didn't but we did get a bit of a refund at least), and was altering my dress at the last minute - not only did she do all this but she was calm and supportive throughout, even when I was getting bridezilla-ish and stressed. AND she looked fabulous on the day after all her hard work :) So thank you Mum, you are the best.

Needless to say we both had an absolutely amazing time on the wedding day - the best day ever in fact - and hope everyone did who came too. I'm not going to post any more pictures as everyone must be sick of the sight of us by now, but I will do a Picasa album of the professional pictures once they come through. I'm very excited about getting them and feel really glad this is something we spent some money on because the day after the wedding when we woke up and it was all over and you realise how much money you spent it's quite scary! But the pictures should be something we treasure forever.

We had a lovely couple of days at Brian's cottage post wedding and mostly slept and ate left over cheese and curry which was just what we needed (thank you Brian).

So again, a big thank you and I leave you with just one picture which is of our best present (thank you Erin!) and also to say that it is soooooo exciting that Moira and John are now engaged!! Think I might turn into some kind of wedding groupie now as I know just how fantastic a time they have ahead of them! Congrats guys :)

Love Kate xxxx