These Are A Few Of My Favourite Things

These crafts which get us sat around the table together are something we are all enjoying very much.

27th March is the anniversary of the death of Maria Von Trapp.

How to mark this date?
Find a mountain to climb?
Run up a batch of matching outfits from the curtains?
Befriend a lonely goatherd?

Make a kitten and mitten garland is what we decided to go for.
After all garlands are one of my favourite things.

S supplied felt tip pens so we could decorate the mittens and draw the whiskers and faces on the kittens.

G decided his cat was called Cuddles.

S decided hers was called Electrocution?!

 I went for naming mine Milly.

I used sellotape to attach them to a piece of string and the garland is now decorating the mirror in our hall way.

A Busy Week....

..... can only mean one thing.
It's back to the wardrobe for quick and easy assistance.

Yesterday was Independence Day in Bangladesh.

The colours on their flag are dark green and red.

I chose to wear the cherry scarf which my lovely friend Jo from Through the Keyhole gave me in our 12 days of Christmas swap.

The stalks are dark green and the red cherries echo the red circle on the flag.

Today is the birthday of Sylvia Anderson who along with her husband gave us Thunderbirds.

I wanted to go the Lady Penelope route but just couldn't come up with anything suitable.

The Thunderbirds would say  F A B to each other as short hand for 'message received and understood' so in the end I went with wearing my Fab lolly brooch.

Friday to Sunday

What better way to relax into the weekend than with a bowl of crisps and a couple of tubs of dip to mark Chip and Dip Day

G and I spent a huge chunk of Saturday starting and finishing this jigsaw. It's 750 pieces and we got the edge assembled in just a few minutes. Parts were very easy to piece together and others were a nightmare, pretty standard for a jigsaw really but once we had started we were determined to complete it in one sitting. My sister gave it to me during the week and said there was one piece missing, in fact there ended up being two pieces missing. I shall donate it to the charity shop next time I have a bag of items to take and leave it up to them if they want to sell it or bin it.
None of this has anything to do with Saturday's activity though which was National Tree Planting Day in Uganda.
For this I chose to send a donation to Tree Aid which helps communities in Africa.

Silly glasses were at the ready this afternoon for our tribute to Elton John on his 71st birthday.

To round off I thought I would share G and S's evening meal as they both loved it.
It's another recipe from the free Co-op magazine, this one is called Cheeseburger Pasta and it can be seen online here.
The recipe states it serves 6 so I only cooked 150g pasta instead of the recommended 250g. 
The quantity made gave G and S a good sized portion each with leftovers. I thought G may like to take this to work tomorrow but S liked it so much she had some of it!

Being Happy

Tuesday was the International Day of Happiness.

Lots of things in my life make me happy.

It goes without saying that top of the list would be my family and my friends, but I thought I would share a photo of something else that makes me happy.

Clothes.

And finding clothes I like, and which fit, at bargain prices.

I realise this may seem a bit shallow.

I have never been a follower of fashion, but over recent years I have begun to enjoy the buying and wearing of clothes more and more.

Finding this outfit made me happy.

Both items were purchased at an end of season £1 clearance in a Cancer Research charity shop.

The skirt is clearly mis-labelled as it states it's a 12 and yet it fits me.

A new outfit consisting of a gorgeous book patterned skirt, with a pretty plain top to team it with and £2 donated to a great charity.

What's not to love.

For World Poetry Day I shall share a poem I first read in a magazine over 20 years ago, I cut it out and pasted into a scrapbook which I still have.

I wanna be your vacuum cleaner

breathing in your dust

I wanna be your Ford Cortina

I will never rust

If you like your coffee hot

let me be your coffee pot

You call the shots

I wanna be yours

I wanna be your raincoat

for those frequent rainy days

I wanna be your dreamboat

when you want to sail away

Let me be your teddy bear

take me with you anywhere

I don’t care

I wanna be yours

I wanna be your electric meter

I will not run out

I wanna be the electric heater

you’ll get cold without

I wanna be your setting lotion

hold your hair in deep devotion

Deep as the deep Atlantic ocean

that’s how deep is my devotion

John Cooper Clarke


Today is As Young As You Feel Day which seeing as I'm doing this year of celebrations because I'm coming up to the big five-O is quite fitting!

Being a huge Marilyn Monroe fan this evening I shall be watching the movie As Young as You Feel  MM doesn't have a huge role in it and it was never going to be a movie to win any awards but it's just the kind of nonsense which helps to while away the time spent at the ironing board.

Oscar, Patrick and Tommy

The 17th Academy Awards were held on 17th March 1945 and the film Going My Way won 7 of the Oscars.

As this is a movie I have never seen before I ordered a copy to watch on Thursday evening.

G had to go and collect S from youth club and so missed out on watching about 30 minutes of it. For once I wished it had been my turn to do the collecting so I could have missed some of it instead.

Definitely one I won't be watching again.

This is what we got up to on Friday for Panda day and then Saturday I was in the kitchen for St Patrick's Day.
Ages ago I saw a recipe in a free magazine for a cake made with Guinness and I thought I had torn it out and kept it safe but I couldn't find it so I went with Delia instead.
What is it with me and cake toppings?
I think I get so pleased when the cake looks vaguely like it should that I just don't concentrate on getting the measurements correct when whipping up the topping ingredients. It was a bit runnier than it needed to be, but it was flavoured with Baileys so really any consistency was acceptable.
Never mind, it tasted good enough.

Snowy Sunday saw us going into town and brings us to Monday 19th March and the birthday of Tommy Cooper.
He only had to appear on the screen and my dad would be laughing.
And so in tribute to Mr Cooper we hope that by donning his trademark head gear we can generate some laughter too.

Poetry in the Snow

As had been forecast we woke this morning to find the world outside our window under a blanket of snow.

We weren't going to let the weather conditions get the better of us though as we had something very important to do.

The 3 of us bundled up in coats, scarves and wellies and set off into town.

Buses were running as the main roads were clear but we wanted to walk and besides you can't have a snowball fight if you're sat on the bus.

Once in town we stopped for brunch, picked up the few odds and ends we needed and then headed to carry out the main purpose for our trek.

The Cenotaph in Southampton is situated in Watts Park on the opposite side of the road to the memorial to the engineers who lost their lives in the sinking of the Titanic.

Edward Lutyens designed the Cenotaph and it was to heavily influence the final design of the Cenotaph in Whitehall.

18th March is the birthday of WW1 poet Wilfred Owen and when I was putting this year worth of activities together my idea was to visit the Cenotaph in remembrance of all those lost during the war.
Since then though things have become more personal as I have begun to research my family tree and one of things I have found were some details concerning a war record for my paternal grandad's uncle Percy. 

Percy Murrey joined the army in 1911 and at the outbreak of the war he was sent to France. He took part in the Battle of Mons and did valuable work in the Battles of La Bessee, Ypres, Loos and the Somme. I believe he was an ambulance driver.
He survived the war but it does make you wonder what he would have seen when he took the wounded soldiers away to be cared for.

G's brother has been doing some research into their family tree too. Their mum's maiden name is Dimmer and by clicking on this link you can read about the extraordinary bravery of one of their distant relatives John Dimmer. He was awarded the VC and the MC for his astoundingly courageous acts.
Sadly John Dimmer did not come home. He was killed in action on 21st March 1918.

This morning I wrote Percy and John names onto two plain luggage label style tags and we tied them to these red roses.
At the Cenotaph G read a poem by Wilfred Owen and we laid the flowers down in the snow.

A Trio of Pandas

This is what was keeping us busy the other evening.

Paper plates transformed into panda faces for

Panda Day.

Fun family time.