A Photo laden update

ARGH! I first wrote this update on the 20th of March, finished it and accidentally closed the window while I was trying to get it to talk to blogger so the first paragraph was all that remained, so here we go again...

I haven't updated recently with photos so here goes. Firstly, here is a picture from my sister's birthday shopping trip - we went to Old Orleans for lunch, and, realising the table clothes were paper, being messy eaters, and having a pot of crayons at our disposal, we became a little artistic.

K is just coming up to her A-levels, so if having to make decisions about university, which means having to go on Open days. Foolishly, she asked me to go with her, so off we trekked, at some UNHOLY hour of the morning, to Bangor. The trip started in fairly leisurely fashion (after we got past the closed section of the M42) and we quickly stopped for breakfast and, more importantly, coffee, as K, who was driving, has been working long hours and has started out to pick me up in the middle of the night. We stopped for coffee a few times, and, at one service station we found this ginormous hammer that had been used to construct the motorway.

Nearby, there was a circle of carved benches and a horseshoe mosaic, with a lump in the middle and I was king of the castle until deposed.

We eventually realised that we weren't going to be there on time so K then decided to drive like Evel Knievel we hanging on for dear life beside her, managing to snap a couple of piccies of the magnificent countryside.

Once we were got there, K went off on a tour of the mountainous campus and I stayed for a finance lecture which was thrilling. Once K got back, we had a presentation from a lovely New Zealand Psychiatrist, then had a coach tour of the campus housing. We then decided to amble down to the town center and see what there was to see and what there was to see was a gorgeous old pier.

We then headed home, by a different route than we had arrived by, through tunnels

and eventually decided to pull off and get something for tea in Chester, however, we didn't realise how far it was and that during the week NOWHERE was open. We ended up, in beautiful, cultural Chester, having to eat overpriced, fairly poor food in the Slug and Lettuce. Then, when we reprogrammed the garmin to take us home it took us via the longest route down tiny back roads and we of course got stuck behind a few lorrys and a hay wagon too so we didn't get home until late.

On the 3rd of March, Mum, two of my aunts and I went to the stitch and knit show. We was a little disappointing - mostly papercrafts which none of us were into, but my mum did get a great throw and a length of organza for a stole, I got some wool for my sisters blanket, Jan, a sari and Ann, cool hat. When I got home, it was a beautiful day and so I took a couple of photos which look far cooler bigger.

Couple of days later, I took the monster to the vets for his vaccinations and then headed to the post office to get a stamp. When I came back, I was greeted by this... I should really have used the polarising lens to minimise the glare but He hopped down too quick.

John has been designing his own studio lights. He completed his first prototype on March 9th and it has to be said that it isn't bad. There are a few design flaws that need to be ironed out, but all in all a good first attempt.

With light:

With Flash:

As you can see the flash gives a much flatter, more boring picture.

Can't remember where we were coming back from, but took some sunsets on the 12th.

Then later that evening...

I have tons more photos to add, but they need to be uploaded so that is it for now...

Bad but impressively epic dream...

So last night I had a nightmare that was so awful I woke up crying and it has sort of stuck with me all day. So in an effort to get rid of it before I go to sleep again, I am going to pop it down here...

It started with some giant disaster (I think it was a comet hitting the earth) where loads of people died. I dashed home to find JJ and K dead in the lounge. It had obviously happened quickly as K still had a book on her lap and JJ had the TV remote in his hand and the TV was still on, but they looked unmolested.

I thought that I would have to check on Mum and Dad, so jumped in the car and headed over there but the roads were largely blocked with dead people in the cars, so I had to walk all the way. When I got there, pretty much everyone in the village was dead except Mum, Dad and Chris (who in my dream still lived next door to my parents even though she moved our years ago). On the TV they said that the impact of the meteor (or whatever it was) was causing the atmosphere to boil away into space and that, over the course of the next 24 hours, everyone who had survived the initial impact would slowly suffocate. Chris was so upset at this and the loss of the boys that she went next door and took sleeping pills to kill herself and there was absolutely nothing we could do to convince to not do it.

While we waited to die, a bunch of about 8 or 9 astronauts walked towards us. They had worked out that, the International Space Station had enough air and supplies for 2 years and were gathering additional supplies before going back up (why they were gathering supplies in deepest darkest Surrey, god only knows). After a couple of years the world would recover and they could return. While we stood talking to them, two of them who had gone further afield for supplies were killed by something, freeing up two places on the station. They said that two of us could go with them and Mum said she didn't want to do it and would take sleeping pills like Chris to avoid the suffocation. So Dad and I sat with her while she took them and we talked to her while she fell asleep. We then put her in bed and left her to go to the station. During the launch, something happened to Dad and he was screaming and yelling and I was strapped in and I couldn't get to him, no matter what I tried, though when we arrived he seemed ok.

We had not been there long before it turned out that a lot of the food supplies had spoiled and we would have to go out and find the bodies of astronauts who had died and eat them. Dad went out on a space walk to start gathering bodies and, while he was out there I realised we had not given Mum enough sleeping pills to kill her and she would be waking up now and then would have to slowly suffocate (it didn't occur to me that she could just take more pills). I went completely berserk, screaming that I had to go back and that is when I woke up and sobbed all over a poor confused and half asleep JJ for about 1/2 hour.

There was another dream, part of the same sequence, but I have no idea how it fitted into the rest of the dream - I was in a large loft apartment with about 50 lesbians dressed as WWII wrafs, and they were script writers for the bbc and were discussing how much they liked Stephen Fry and one was saying how, when she was alive, she made a hole in the riser of the staircase so that she could watch womens ankles as they went up the stairs?! Bizarre.

Anyway, hopefully that is the end of it and I can have a good nights sleep tonight...