A favour to ask my blog readers.

Tonight I have a favour to ask of my blog readers. This young man I'm going to write was brought to my notice very recently. His name is Ren Gill, and has suffered from varying levels of ME/CFS for four years. At it's worst this illness has, at it's worst confined him to bed, made him unable to even raise food to his mouth, and found it very difficult to put a sentence together. 

By doing a lot of research he has found that there is a doctor in New York that has cured the particularly nasty strain of ME/CFS that he has got. His dream is to try and raise enough money to go and see this doctor to try and get a cure for himself, so he can carry on his dream of being a successful musician. Being a proud man he doesn't want to be thought of as a charity case, so he is offering to send a 5 track EP by email  to anyone that donates £5 or more. This is his donation page,  Help Ren Get Better where he explains in much more detail what exactly is wrong with him and why he is doing this. I know times are hard for a lot of people all over the world, and that like the UK a lot of countries are gripped in a recession, but if any of you can see it in your hearts to donate anything at all, it would help this young man so much. It doesn't even have to be £5, whatever you can spare will be appreciated I know. 

No show snow

Despite most of the UK getting a good healthy dumping of snow, here in Lancaster all we got was a few hours of very fine fairy dust type snow, which had no chance of settling. As I'm a lover of snow I was very disappointed. Especially as my daughter in Anglesey was posting loads of photos of all the snow they had there. If it wasn't for the fact she's got a tyre on the edge of being legal, I would have been hot footing it back to Anglesey as fast as I could !!

Last week was a very busy week for birthdays !! It was Jim's oldest daughter Kate's birthday on Monday, and also my granddaughter Rheanna's, Tuesday it was Jims youngest daughter Mary's 21st birthday and my grandson Jamie's, and then Jim's on Friday !!!

Saturday night, it was off out on the town to the Kashish restaurant. I have to say I was extremely impressed with the decor in there, it was amazing. I couldn't fault the service, it was very polite and attentive. However as there was 12 of us,  we were upstairs and when the main course arrived brought up from the kitchen downstairs, Jim and his daughter Rach's biriani meal was slightly cold round the edges, personally I would have complained but they didn't want to. Everyone else's was fine though, and the nan breads ( as you'll see from the photo's ) are the biggest I've ever seen at about 18" long !! At the end of the meal, a waiter brought over what we thought were peppermints ....wrong lol. Much to our amusement the waiter poured really hot water on the "peppermints" and they swelled up to 3 times the size and turned out to be wipes to wash our hands with.

The birthday girl herself.



Front left is Jims daughter Kate, who's birthday it was on Monday.



The peppermints lol

Back again !!

Here I am back again, and so quickly too, not like me I know ...but I'm in a writing mood so where better to waffle than on my blog.

The weather here in the UK has at long last turned a little bit more winter like, gone are mild and wet days ...hoorah. Back are cold, frosty and sometimes foggy days. I love this kind of weather, heavy frosts turn the most boring of plants into sparkling white works of art. It also means we have to try and get as much wood as we can, to keep the house warm. Going out on wood runs is one of my favourite things to do, I love being out and about in the crisp cold weather, and feeling the rush when we spy some nice seasoned wood lying on the ground just ready for being sawn up and taken home.

Jim bought a trailer for his bike, specifically for carrying the wood home on, it also comes in quite handy for when we do big food shops too. A lot of this week already had prearranged things for Jim to do, so today was the first proper day we've had this week to go out and do two wood runs. What a successful day it was too, not only two loads of normal wood, but also loads of kindling courtesy of a skip on the way to get our 2nd load. My job is to do the kindling, I can't climb all over the place like Jim does, so I sit on my scooter quite happily breaking up smaller pieces of wood, as we've had so much rain here the ground was sodden and both Jim and I ended up with our boots covered in mud !!! Jim's boots of course are proper boots, mine however are silly black suede fashion boots, so you can imagine what they look like after an afternoon of using them to smash up bits of wood on a muddy path lol. So I've bitten the bullet and ordered some half decent ones off Ebay lol.

Yesterday Jim went off for another bike ride, this time with his mate Jon Hodkin as he was down from the Western Isles of Scotland for a couple of days. The aim of the bike ride was to get Jon some practise on for his forth coming bike ride across Canada for charity. Jon has done many bike rides with his tuba across the country, doing workshops in schools, Inner Tuba is Jons website, on here you will see not only see details of his up and coming tour of Canada in 2014, but also if you click on the tab " detailed article " you can read all about Jon's other tours, it's a very interesting read.

As always a few photo's to go with my ramblings.

Firstly a couple of fungi photo's .



 

Next a very atmospheric photo of Glasson Docks in the fog.




This is Jons bike that he will use to travel across Canada.



Finally a photo of Jim's trailer loaded up with wood.

Happy New Year !!

A little late I know but Happy New Year to anyone that pops along to read my blog. I hope you all had a lovely Christmas too. Mine was great, although I have to say this being the first Christmas in 41 yrs that I haven't had any of my kids with me, it felt a bit odd and I missed them loads. My oldest daughter Emma, her hubby and my grand daughter Lacey Mae, did come and stay for a few days just before New Year, and I really enjoyed seeing them.

Seeing as it's been a while since I posted on here I thought I'd add a few extra photo's than usual. Some from the brief cold spell we had way before Christmas and some taken around Christmas and New Year time. For Christmas, Jim bought me a nice Fuji compact camera, as we've missed some really good unexpected things, just because I hadn't got my big camera with me. So now this little compact camera sits in my handbag all the time. As far as normal day time photo's go, I have to say it's excellent the quality and colour is extremely good and almost on a par with my big dslr camera. Night time and macro shots however it falls down a bit in quality, but it's so good to have a camera with us all the time, I'll forgive it.

So here we go, to start off with 3 photo's of hoar frost taken just before Christmas.

 








If you look hard at this next photo in the middle on the right hand side you'll see tiny part of a rainbow cloud I managed to capture.



This next photo was taken on New Year Eve, what a welcome change from all the grey and gloomy weather we'd been having when the sun popped out for a change. It showed off the River Lune and the Aquaduct off really well.

 



Finally, a couple of photo's Jim took when he went off for a bike ride the other day. This includes of course one of his bikes lol.

 

This is Crook O Lune