SnapShots & WhatNots

Hello 2016!!

Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and are enjoying the first few days of 2016. Boomer and I spent Christmas here in South Carolina while Kathy went home for the first time in three years. She had a great time spending the holidays with her family while Boomer and I got as festive as possible here.....plenty of Christmas movies, hot chocolate, listening to my new Adele album, mulled wine, a box of Cadbury chocolate biscuits....oh yea I totally spoilt myself!

2015 was an interesting year - it had lots of ups including marrying my best friend, going on a fabulous honeymoon to Key West and Miami and being awarded a scholarship for cancer research - it also had a couple of downs, some very stressful weeks wondering about the future and job and visa issues that made the last few months of 2015 very hard. You might have noticed that I've been very quiet on here lately and that's why, I just didn't have the motivation to share much. 

2016 is a new year - things are better job and visa wise (not perfectly sorted out yet but getting there) and I'm more motivated that ever to start making some positive moves career wise......time to start thinking bigger/better/moving on etc......but rather then stressing about it like I did all in 2015, in 2016 I'm going to take it as it comes and stress less. 

So here's to 2016, I'm ready for you! I also have a million different knitting and sewing project ideas floating around in my head and I can't wait to get started. My finish 15 in 2015 was a bust...especially from a sewing perspective, I completed (knitted and blogged about) 7 knits even though I have 4 more that are finished but no shared and I only 3 sewing projects....pretty crappy!!! I've no plans to start a 16 in 2016 instead I'll just aim to complete all the projects that are currently waiting in the wings. I also want to dye more yarn, it's been such a fun learning process and I can't wait to do more! and of course to keep blogging along the way 

Happy New Year everyone!

PS: Boomer's lovely Christmas sweater was a gift from Funky Christmas Jumpers - thanks guys!

I missed October!

Hello! I'm still here I just seem to have missed October. October was a crazy month, a fantastic month but crazy nonetheless. I spent a fabulous 2 weeks on honeymoon followed by a less than fabulous week recovering from the removal of an impacted wisdom tooth (ouch but yay no more wisdom teeth!) and then a week back in work playing catch up and prepping myself for the next couple of crazy weeks that are coming up. 

I have so many photo and stories that I want to share and remember and I also have 3 finished knitted items and a quilt and a fab work in progress to show you! I'm still playing catch up but at least this catch up is fun!

 

Apple picking in North Carolina

On Sunday morning we woke up relatively early and drove up to North Carolina to go apple picking with some friends. We did this two years ago and ended up eating all the apples we got within about 2 weeks…making it not exactly worth the long car ride. So this time we bought twice as many apples and I almost made myself sick from eating so many while we were there – it’s pretty amazing to pick them straight from the tree and just crunch right in! So delicious!

There was also a beautiful field of pumpkins and sunflowers which I couldn’t resist taking photo of. Our friends used the day as an opportunity to take family photos but we on the other hand had hair sticking out in all directions and I looked like I’d been dragging through the corn maze backwards. Instead we just took photos of the flowers and ate some apple cider doughnuts.

Now I'll spend the rest of the week baking apple sauce...apple butter....apple pie...apple bread.....and anything else I can think of with apples in it! The house is going to smell amazing!

Oh, Calamity!!

A character in a book I recently read says “Oh, Calamity!” all the time and it’s managed it wedge itself into my brain. It also perfectly describes the series of unfortunate events that have been going on over the last few days.

Less than 8 hours after getting stitches removed from my arm (another mole removal procedure) the “healed” wound burst back open leaving a hole the size of a quarter in my arm of semi-healed skin. It was really painful and I was terrified that I was going to get a terrible scar from it. There was some very panicked and tear-inducing patching up that occurred in the pharmacy car park with butterfly closures and tape followed by a trip back to the dermatologist first thing the following morning.  She said that re-stitching it would cause an even bigger scar and that the best thing I could do was continue to keep it taped as closely together as possible. That was all going fine until last night when removal of a section of tape caused a massive blister to burst……turns out I’m allergic to the tape. So now I have two painful wounds on my arm and knitting is extremely painful (so is work….but I’m more upset about the knitting part!)….oh, calamity indeed!

In addition to my arm being busted up, poor Kathy was feeling under the weather and little Boomer picked up a skin infection from a horrible combination of insect bites and humid muggy weather. As Kathy was attempting to sleep off her virus and I was at the dermatologist the roof started leaking through the light fixture! Excellent stuff…..turns out the tree branch that fell a few weeks back did indeed damage the roof…..landlord was delighted with that phone call.

But, I’ll bet he was even more delighted when I called him on Sunday morning to tell him that yet another tree branch had fallen. This time it was a neighbour’s tree that had fallen across our front yard at 5am on Sunday morning. Thankfully it didn’t so any damage to the house or our car but it did scare the bejaysus out of me! At least some good will come out of it….the landlord and the neighbor are now planning on clearing out the trees and overhanging branches so that it shouldn’t happen again.

Now for a quiet week please!

Big News!!!

 

Even though I have a blog and I share a whole load of random things about my life, things I’m making and doing etc. I’m also a painfully private person when it comes to the things that really matter to me. One of those things is my relationship with Kathy. I never mentioned our relationship here on the blog out of respect to my parents who didn’t know about our relationship for a long time. However, it’ll be impossible for me to continue referring to her as my friend (even though of course she is my best friend) because on Friday afternoon she became my wife.

We travelled to Charleston and got married in a small civil ceremony with two friends as witnesses/photographers/bridesmaids/ring bearers/”crying folk”. It was very relaxed, special, meaningful and absolute perfect for us. I’m incredibility happy and proud that I’m now able to call her my wife and that she agreed to spend the rest of our lives together.

I couldn’t be happier right now if I tried!