I had a really great weekend!
And I’m posting lots of pictures! Make tea…

Since I retired often the weekends can meld into the rest of the week but this weekend was different.
I had a few wishes come true.
I have wanted to meet up with fellow bloggers since I started my blog five years ago (next week). This weekend I did.

I have wanted to go on a photo walk around Bristol for ages. This weekend I did.

Why?

Why not?

Because he can. At least he was trying to…

We had such fun trying to guess what he was going to do as he tied ropes to the trees, and as we watched as a lady came walking along and didn’t see the rope!! Oh she was fine!!

I have wanted to walk in a field of buttercups and take photos. This weekend I did.

I have been looking forward to the Bristol 10K for months, from a photographic, NOT taking part, point of view! (If you knew me you would be laughing).

All these things happened over the weekend. It’s extraordinary how weeks go by with nothing, then, like busses, they all come at once.

So thanks to Helena for making the trip to Bristol. Oh! she is so lovely.

Friday After a lovely lunch and a walk, Helena walked with me in a buttercup field

And I was able to look at my hometown with fresh eyes, which is always nice.

Saturday Helena, Maggie, Barbara and I had a really nice lunch by the Floating Harbour in Bristol. Unfortunately Eileen wasn’t well enough to join us.
We almost adoped/kidnapped a woman who we thought was (Eileen) wandering around looking lost. None of us knew what Eileen looks like and we thought maybe she had felt well enough to come but couldn’t contact us. Blogging sure does turn a ‘nothing’s hapnin’ into a story!
Thanks to Maggie (so lovely) who organised the photo walk along part of the sculpture trail in the city. She did a brilliant job and she has a lovely post up on her blog about it.
Thanks to Barbara also absolutely lovely, who brought with her, tales from her life with her greyhound. Some of you will know that I share my life with a greyhound, so I was thrilled to talk ‘greyhound’ with her. I forgot to ask her about Geocaching but I’ll meet her again and she can tell me all about it.

Sunday The Bristol 10K was wonderful.
The sun shone, (they had forecast rain!) There were 15,000 runners and my boy and his girl were there among the throng.

They finished the race

made good times, had the biggest, widest smiles and raised lots of money for MIND.

We are so proud of the pair of you.

Thank you for your donations/good wishes/kind thoughts. It really does make a difference.

Thank you ladies for taking the time out to visit Bristol. I loved every second of it.

Thanks to Ben & Paul for coming along and taking group photos with each of our cameras (too funny).

After the race on Sunday we went to a beautiful Italian restaurant. The service was a little slow but we hung on. Those of us who had run the race were ‘pegging out’ as my mum used to say. Eventually our starters came and were absolutely beautiful, clean plates all ‘round which was a very good thing as about 15 minutes later a smell came drifting by. I thought the pork I had ordered had ‘caught’; Lotta thought someone’s hair was singed. The boys were blaming the smell on each other!
Staff came by and apologised but the kitchen had caught fire! After a lot of chat about staying or going and drinking the complimentary drinks the staff came by again to say that the chefs weren’t going to turn the ovens on because the smell of gas was far too strong. Yes we left, headed back into town to have our main course somewhere else.

So all in all I’m back at home and at the beginning of a new week and a new month having had a great weekend.

Thanks B&L for having us over the weekend. Another first, they were wonderful hosts.

Thanks Sian, Me on Monday is her brilliant idea.

Oh! and Happy Birthday to my lovely husband, thank you for the weekend.
Good Luck to Lotta who will be burning the midnight oil until 4pm on Wednesday.

I’m hoping it will still be Monday by the time I press ‘publish’
Phew! well done if you kept up. 🙂

Waving from Weston on a dry and calm day after a weekend that was extremely wet and windy, so I stayed in!

It was a lovely, quiet weekend. The sort that allows you to make a book: A book I’ve been wanting to make for ages – A printed book from Blurb.co.uk.

For a few months in 2013 and 2014 I took part in an online project called Five Minute Friday by Lisa-Jo Baker. She gave a prompt and you had to write about it for five minutes, not paying attention to spelling or grammar, just write and share on her blog.
(Lisa-Jo isn’t running the meme anymore, she has handed it over to Kate Motaung)

I always wanted to see this project printed.

So, over the weekend I went back to my writing and added punctuation and corrected grammar and of course let the software at Blurb run a spell check.
That was the best laugh of the weekend, should I change ‘don’t’ to ‘donut’ and ‘Miriam’ to ‘Miscarriage’ and a myriad of other hysterical substitutions.

So that was my weekend. A new bit of software learnt, pictures collected, words organised, review done and the ‘Buy Book’ button pressed.

Saying hello to fellow bloggers on a Monday is one of Sian’s brilliant ideas.

This is the cover of my book.

Waving to blog friends on a very overcast Monday.

It was a weekend full of treats and surprises, I felt thoroughly spoilt and loved and I am still smiling even after ‘the supermarket shop’.
It was a not getting up kind of Sunday and a going out for a special treat on Saturday kind of weekend.

A thinking about my mother and all my friends who are mothers kind of weekend.
A very dear lady with the same name as me passed away this weekend, so thoughts of her kind of weekend. My M-i-L has lived next to her for 50 years. That’s a long time to be neighbours…

A flower arranging kind of weekend, looking for vases, cutting and sealing stems and taking a few pictures kind of weekend.
A no cooking weekend and best of all a surprise visit from Ben.

My Saturday treat was a Fish and Chip supper aboard The Matthew in Bristol.

I made this collage with Collage It for Mac

The Matthew is a representation of the 15th Century caravel which took John Cabot with his crew of 18 from Bristol to Newfoundland in 1497. The Matthew was launched in 1996 during The Festival of the Sea in Bristol. We were there to see it with a very unhappy seven year old Ben…I had forgotten that until just this moment.

John Cabots Matthew

Me on Monday is Sian’s idea, thank you Sian.