5th - 11th November

A short post this week as the end of it got a little weird.

This week I have been

Watching - Rocky trying to adjust to wearing his cone. He had the snip last week.

I took him back to the vets today, all is healing well and he's allowed outside once again.

Celebrating - with a sparkler. G's sister's birthday is on 5th November. As you can tell from the photo this year was a special one for her. 
Family friend L (along with her son, daughter and son's girlfriend) created a wonderful two tiered bonfire cake and they also made this Guy and box of fireworks. Included were a set of mini sparklers, one for each guest at her celebratory birthday meal.

Trying - to look fierce with the help of these fangs. On November 8th 1847 Bram Stoker was born, so with the help of these photo booth props left over from Halloween we channeled our inner vampire.

Extraordinarily Grateful - to our wonderful NHS. 
When I woke up yesterday morning G told me he had been awake for a few hours with chest pains. What kind of pains I wanted to know. Not worrying pains he said. 26 years ago he had a viral infection which affected the pericardium and he said it felt similar. So he rang 101 for advise. They said because the pain had been there for a few hours they were sending an ambulance to check his heart. It arrived shortly afterwards and an ECG was done. The results were leaning towards another incidence of pericarditis but they took him to hospital so he could be thoroughly checked and the option of a heart attack ruled out. Thankfully after having various tests and seeing a cardiologist this was indeed the conclusion so 12 hours later I collected him from the hospital. He has some medication and needs to rest. 
Here's to a less dramatic week ahead.

29th October - 4th November

This week I have been

Enjoying - the flame red colour of the leaves on the trees. There is a line of half a dozen of these trees in the car park near my place of work and they are a delight to see.

Loving - the fact our bathroom is another stage nearer completion. The lino was laid on Tuesday which means it's an awful lot warmer in there now. I really love the differing shades of grey and silver.

Having the floor down also meant that the new to us piece of furniture which has been sat in the dining room for the past couple of weeks could be put into place.
We found this pine child's size wardrobe on Gumtree for £35. The seller very kindly agreed to deliver to us for an extra £5. G painted it a shade called Stormy Blue and it's now home to our towels, bathroom cleaning products, loo roll and other odds and ends. Perfect.

Celebrating -Halloween with friends. This year we invited our friends G and M over with their two children J and G. S was in charge of helping them dish out the sweets to our treat or treat callers. It was a slow start to the evening but in the end I think we had somewhere between 70 and 80. 
S made these gruesome looking eyeballs for us all to eat

and whilst she did those I used a tube of black icing to paint faces onto marshmallows which I took in to work so we could have a sweet treat there too.

Trying - out a couple of new recipes for breakfast time. During the week it's always two Weetabix but come the weekend I want to have something a bit different. With G on the Slimming World regime I have been looking at ideas on various websites and baked oats is a firm favourite. I made these on Saturday morning, they are flavoured with lemon fat free Greek yogurt. I served them with a blob of jam and natural flavoured Greek yogurt. Warm from the oven they were lovely.

Then on Sunday I made this jammy dodger french toast inspired by sarah_sw_recipes on Instagram. I didn't put in enough cinnamon so I know to increase that the next time I do these. This really filled me up.

Going - out in our, new to us, car.
Yes we are car owners once again. I detest the whole looking for cars thing. Both G and I have zero knowledge when it comes to cars. We have been half heartedly looking for a few weeks but the time had come to make more of an effort. 
The result is that we are now KA owners.
We are in the incredibly lucky position of not needing a car to get us to work. With it just being the three of us these days we now don't need a larger family size car.
Most of the things we need to do can be accomplished (with a bit of forward planning) on foot, with public transport and online shopping, so it is a bit of a luxury having a car sat outside for the convenience of being able to pop out and get us from A to B when we need to do just that.
Considering all of these things we wanted to buy something small and cheap to run and fingers crossed this will fit the bill just nicely.