Down come our trees...

We've been involved in a long wrangle for over a year now over some trees in our car park which have been causing damage to one of the buildings next to us. We were finally given the go-ahead last week to have them felled and the men arrived early this morning to cut them down. We all knew it was going to happen but it was still sad to see them go, as in Spring and Summer they really are very beautiful, especially the flowering cherry which has gorgeous blossom. Luckily I have two of their offspring in the garden at work but I'll have to keep a close eye on them as we don't want them causing damage as well in years to come!

We opened to the public today as a lot of schools had a training day and we were busy which was a bonus. Sophie and Mikey also had the day off so Soph helped out in the kitchen while I caught up with a load of office work that had to be sorted before the end of the month...yes, it's March tomorrow. I can hardly believe it!

Another disappointing day...

Well, today didn't really go as planned and was a little (OK, maybe a lot) disappointing. Mum and I, along with a reluctant Sophie, went off down to Kent to see if I could find the graves of my great great grandparents who were buried at St Mary's Church in Stone. I was full of hope and optimism as the grave would have been dated 1919 and surely, I imagined, it would be legible. I was hoping to find birth dates on the grave and therefore solve a big mystery.

The reality, however, was that I found no trace of the grave so either my great great grandparents didn't have a headstone, or the one they had had weathered away (hard to believe). I was bitterly disappointed but we went off to Stone Cemetery again in the vain hope we might find them there, but no luck. I knew deep down they couldn't have been there as they weren't on the burial records so we said a quick hello to Frederick and Fanny and then drove off to Watling Street Cemetery to find the grave of my great grandmother, Ethel.

My luck was really out today as we couldn't find that one either and I was coming to the sad conclusion that maybe my relatives just couldn't afford a decent headstone to mark their graves. My great grandmother had died in 1917 when the first world war was raging and had left about 12 children so maybe the money just wasn't there to spend on a headstone.

We drove to Nan's flat in the rain feeling as miserable as the weather and had lunch. I'd planned on taking her to Eynesford for a cup of tea but the weather had turned nasty so that plan was postponed. She was very surprised to see us and after having something to eat, Sophie and I ventured back to the graveyard at St Mary's Church to see if we could have another look and to write down an inscription that we saw on a grave that included the name Collins. However, the recent rain had made the words much harder to read (typical!) so after wandering around and scaring ourselves silly we admitted defeat and headed back to pick mum up for the journey home.

Oh well...at least the drive was fast and problem-free!!

Domestic bliss!

I wish I could say I did something really exciting today, but I can't. After a lie-in, which was lovely, I was forced into doing some domestic chores that couldn't be ignored, such as changing our bedding and cleaning the nasty cupboard under the stairs where our waste bin lives. The children are put in charge of washing up and stacking the dishwasher and their aim when they scrape the plates is not always spot on, as I found out this morning. I have an almost obsessional thing about the kitchen being clean and tidy and I was disgusted with the state of this cupboard, so everything came out and about a million pairs of shoes taken upstairs (most of them belonging to Sophie). I'm sure there was something living in the bottom of the bin so that was subjected to a gallon of hot water to kill off any nasty bugs that were lurking about...

Sophie, bless her, was working for us today so I dropped her off at work at midday (in my scruffs I have to add, so I didn't dare go inside in case I frightened the customers) and then went back home to continue the blitz on the house. Tomorrow I'm off to Kent with mum to hang around some more graveyards so I'll have no time to do anything in the house - Keith will just have to carry on where I left off...! Haha!

Friday 25 February

I heaved a sigh of relief when we left work on Friday to go home. It's been a busy week and I have to confess we were all shattered. My cold didn't help much, either, so when I got home it was to do very little. Sophie went off to a friend's house and after dropping Keith off at the pub, I had a long soak in the bath, which was bliss. We even had a takeaway for dinner so it was a very lazy evening!

Normally I love Friday night - I pack everyone off to bed at 10pm and settle down to watch a film or catch up with programmes I've recorded, but last night I was in bed and almost asleep before everyone else! 

Technology and me do not mix...

I have a cold and I'm not happy. I really don't need the nasty sniffles this week!

At the moment, technology and me are not getting on. Sophie's laptop refused to turn on the other day so it had to be returned to the repair shop. This time, however, it can't be fixed (or so they say). The motherboard is dead. So on Thursday I was fuming about the amount of money I'd wasted on trying to get it going again - £90 for the previous repair, £20 for a download so that Sophie could transfer her music and photos back onto it, £14 for a memory stick so she could save all her stuff (useless now as it's all gone again) and £14 for a new lead as I thought that was the problem. I'm not accepting that it's dead, though, and I'm going to contact Hewlett Packard to say that it really should have lasted more than a year and I want them to repair it, even though it's out of warranty. I'm prepared for a fight!

On Wednesday night I wasted a precious hour of my life trying to download a file so that I could transfer photos from my mobile phone to the home computer. Somehow I managed to transfer the pics of the barn fire to my laptop, but after that it refused to work again so I tried the home computer. After downloading the file it said it was unable to read something or other, resulting in more frustration! Maybe I should just chuck all our computers, phones, laptops and ipods into the bin and vow never to use them again...or maybe not! Grrrr! Why do we rely on these things so much!

Late again!

Yesterday was a bit quieter on the excitement front, although I was delighted to see my photo of the Barn Fire in the local newspaper! It's still burning (even on Thursday as I write this a bit late) and there are strong suspicions that it was started deliberately. It's just very lucky that the nearby houses weren't affected.

So Wednesday was another extremely busy day at work and we all mucked in to help, including Sophie who did a brilliant job on the till in the kitchen. We were hard at it right up until 5pm so when I got home I just collapsed on the sofa with a glass of wine and did very little! Roll on the weekend!

A bit of excitement...

Driving home from work tonight (and already spooked by seeing the Fire Brigade and an ambulance tearing past near work) we were shocked to get to the village and see a huge cloud of smoke in the sky. When we rounded the corner to head towards home we saw that a huge hay barn in the middle of the village was burning. The amazing thing was that there was no-one about, so I pulled in opposite and we called the Fire Brigade. As so often happens in a situation like that I couldn't remember the name of the road but managed to give directions. By now, a small crowd had gathered but I can't believe we were the first to call the Fire Brigade! We waited as more and more people stopped to watch, some people taking photographs, including us:

The Fire Brigade took a while to arrive (the one we had seen had no connection to this fire) and I started to panic that I'd given them the wrong directions! However, two of them turned up and then there was some confusion as to where the water hydrant was. The smoke was billowing over the village and there were explosions popping off and bits of burning debris floating in the air. The barn is surrounded by three or four houses and I think it had affected one of them as the firemen concentrated on that first.

We left after the firemen closed the road, much to Sophie's disgust!

Update: Just watched ourselves on Look East!!! Much excitement in the household tonight!!