Scrapbook Saturday: My first attempt!

Scrapbook Saturday is a new innovation by MammaDawg. I have to admit when she invited me to join in I felt some trepidation as I have not been scrapbooking for very long and don't have much of a collection built up to exhibit. This is in fact my first attempt at scrapbooking so please make allowances. The hardest thing I find is choosing elements and knowing where to place them for best effect. In fact I love browsing through other peoples scrapbooking web pages & albums looking for ideas and inspiration and hopefully will get better with practice!


For a good source of very nice scrapbooking material try Mangels Designs and for a great way to display your digital scapbook pages I recommend Flip Album or FLIP Flash Album.

(Not) Wordless Wednesday

OK, so it's not Wednesday - and it's not exactly wordless!, but having missed it I thought what the heck! Here's a lovely picture of Hubby together with the Step Daughter & new Grandson aged 12 weeks - all together now, Aaaaaaw. The pic below is of my daughter and grandson - so that's the whole family covered!

Wallpaper paste creates havoc!

Well if it's not one thing, it's another! Having cancelled the holiday in Devon due to the weather being so pants, and having been at home for over a week with only his PC and Flight Simulator to keep him amused, Hubby decided that this would be a good time to finish decorating the kitchen!

This is a project he started about 6 months ago. Every time he painted the walls he decided after a couple of weeks that he wasn't happy with the colour, so he would go out and buy some more paint! The last layer was a lemony yellow which we both agree is too bright as the tiles and cupboards are a sort of oatmeal colour. So yesterday he went and bought some ivory cream paint and a roll of lining paper to improve the finish of the old walls. He had just climbed up the stepladder to place his first piece with a big bucket of freshly mixed wallpaper paste.

I suddenly heard this huge crash followed by an ominous silence, and then the air turned blue! I rushed out to find that he had knocked the bucket off a shelf and it had cascaded on to the floor, covering the electric meter and mains switches in wallpaper paste on the way down!

45 minutes later we had managed to clear it all up, using a dustpan to scoop up the layer on the floor, which is fortunately vinyl sheet. We went through about 2 rolls of kitchen paper and several of the dogs towels came in handy as well! Finally we were able to clean up the last vestiges of paste with a big dampened decorating sponge. God, that stuff is sticky!!

We had turned off the electric as soon as we saw the danger and had to take out all the fuses and clean them off before switching it back on again. Fortunately the viscose nature of the paste meant it had not penetrated into the innards of the elctrics so we were able to clean it up without too much trouble and switched everything back on OK - but it was a scary 10 minutes I can tell you!

Anyway we could well have done without that as it put Hubby's schedule back quite a bit, but trouper that he is, he got right back on it and has now finished the wallpapering, which has improved the overall look a lot, and has started painting the walls. He is perched on the worktop trying to paint round the top of the walls without getting it on the ceiling as well. I may go and give him a hand presently - or there again I may not (I've always found it best to just let him get on with it!).

What a wash out!

At this point I'd like to tell you all about the great holiday we just had in beautiful, sunny Devon - but I can't - because we didn't!

We were all booked up to go down for a week in the caravan, we had found this great site overlooking the river Dart, just down from the picturesque town of Dartmouth and with great views across the river. I was really looking forward to lovely evenings with great views & sunsets and days spent exploring the Torbay area, Dartmoor and the South Hams. One of the most beautiful areas in the UK.

Sadly it was not to be. The British Weather decided to do it's damndest and it became obvious by lunchtime on Saturday that it would be a complete waste of time to go. There was even a Severe Weather Warning put out for Devon with torrential rain and gale force winds forecast for pretty much the entire week.

So after some discussion and with the thought of trying to cope with 2 soaking wet dogs in a fairly small caravan every time they had to be taken for walks, and no chance of glorious views or sunsets etc., we sadly came to the conclusion there was nothing for it but to cancel the holiday and stay at home!

The only consolation has been the conviction we did the right thing as we stare out of the window at the lashing rain and the wind bending the trees. At least we are warm and dry and comfy cosy even if the British Summer has forsaken us. We just have to hope the week we have booked in September in the Lake District will prove better (she says optimistically - but don't hold your breath!).

New Blog Launched! : News, Views, Thrills & Spills

I am delighted to announce the launch of my new Blog - News, Views, Thrills & Spills. This will be exclusively for non personal posts while 'Tails of Terror' will be retained for personal postings. Old non personal postings have now been removed from this blog, but are now available on the new one. Please visit my new neighbourhood. Hope to see you there soon :-)

This has been an interesting experience as when I made the decision to split off the non personal stuff I thought I would try a Wordpress.com hosted blog. I transferred all the old posts from Blogger ok, but when I started building the page I realised just how restricting Wordpress is, particularly with what you can put on the sidebar. So I made the decision to start another on Blogger and have now transferred back all the posts that I'd put on Wordpress to the new News, Views, Thrills & Spills blog which is now up and running.

I then made the mistake of thinking that as I liked the new template so much I'd use it for this blog. After hours of wrestling with all the settings and code, losing all my widgets and generally tearing my hair out I came to the conclusion that this WAS NOT A GOOD IDEA!! I have now reinstated most of my widgets, but I've lost all the visitor locations on Clustrmaps so have to start again!

Blog has New Look - the pink is gone!

I've been working on a new look for the Blog for nearly a week now as I felt it was about time I got rid of the pink - not everyones taste I know! Having trawled through a large number of possible replacement backgrounds I initially settled on a rather busy modern arty one and used a light turquoise for the body colour. I rather enjoyed the fun of this for several days (some of you may have seen it if you have popped in recently), but really it was far too busy and distracting and really detracted from the blog itself. I have got quite good at editing the html of my blog now

So today, I determined to find something more cool, calm and collected. I started by choosing a body colour and went through a whole gamut of options before settling on the one you see (Hex colour FFFFCC), a lovely soft creamy shade and definitely easier on the eyes than previous colours!

Next on the agenda was to find a background that would look nice with the cream. After much searching and trial runs I settled on this lovely one of blue spheres and stars from www.moobackgrounds.com. I think the effect is rather nice. I have also pruned several of the wigets from my sidebar so it is not so busy, only keeping those I really like. What do you think? Is it an improvement, do you find it easy to look at and read? I would love to know so please leave a comment if you like it (or even if you don't!).

TO ALL MY 'NUTTY' FRIENDS (Squirrel massage piccy must be seen!)

Have a fabulous STRESS FREE day!!!

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