Silent Sunday

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Good Riddance 2013

 

I don't know about you but I'm glad to see the back of 2013, it has been a terrible year for us.

 

I was forced into Medical Retirement from a job I loved 3 days before Christmas in 2012, which has resulted in me struggling to learn to survive on a tiny pension. Being unable to get a job and not qualifying for any benefits, this year has involved much tightening of my belt and learning to budget.

 

Himself has been most unwell and had to have two unsuccessful operations and is currently awaiting a third this month.

 

  

Christmas came and went, we had a power cut over the whole period and much of the surrounding area in Godalming was flooded, devastating many homes.

 

 

This picture was taken Christmas morning and is our local Bowling Green, more pictures can be found over on Badger Boo's Blog.

 

We're all electric here, so had no heat or oven to cook the Christmas Dinner, my brother kindly invited us over to his for lunch. We had a fantastic Christmas Dinner and it was most enjoyable to spend time with my family again.

Something I haven't done for many years, as Christmas is usually a very depressive time for me. Surprisingly with all that was going on this year with the weather and power cut I was feeling pretty upbeat for a change. 

 

So I say Good Riddance 2013 and welcome 2014 I have plans for you.

 

Happy New Year

 

xxx

 

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Smile it's the Weekend

 I'm sick to death of hospitals!
I spend a lot of time at the RSCH with my own conditions, but this year I'm there practically every week, if it's not me it's Himself.

It all started last year when Himself had severe complications after a routine operation, which  I wrote about at the time.
Eventually he recovered, although he still suffers pain in his left side at the operation site, he's had to learn to live with it.

This year Himself started treatment for a kidney stone in his right kidney, after several unsuccessful rounds of Lithotripsy (not sure of spelling) and two operations, stents and months of agonising pain, the stone has still not been removed, the stent causes him excruciating pain 24/7 and he's waiting for a third operation to try and remove it.

He had his second operation in September and even though his surgeon says it is urgent, he was informed yesterday he has another 18 week wait!

As a result he's now being forced to research going Private as he can't bear it any longer, and frankly nor can I. 
It's been going on for far too long!

Tempers are frayed, we both need more rest than we're getting as neither of us can do much for our selves, let alone each other and life is very hard.


I know your thinking " But where's the smile this week?"

Well I have two for you, the first is Himself's favorite video of all time and always makes him laugh, and the second is one of my many favorites, enjoy.






Your welcome to link up below about anything you want, you can even grab the Inlinkz code to add to your post if you want. All are welcome and it stays open until midnight Sunday.
Full details here.

Hope you all have a great weekend.
xxx

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It's Nice to Be Appreciated

Welcome to "Smile it's Friday" which I'm now hosting here every Friday instead of over at Badger Boo's. 

Himself  and I had a little trip into Guildford this week to attend a presentation for local St John members. Himself was being awarded a certificate for doing over 1000 hours volunteering as a Community First Responder, which is an outstanding number of hours considering his own medical problems in the past year. 

Such a selfless person, willing to do so much for others, even when I'm moaning at him to stop and take it easy.

You may remember we attended a presentation in Redhill for his 500 hour certificate last year, and if your maths is any good that's over 1500 hours of volunteering whilst working full time in London.

Where he finds the energy from I have no idea! 

Things are good here I'm slowly but surely getting into a routine, I have a few Craft Fairs booked and a couple of commissions I'm working on at the moment, this blog isn't about my crafts so if you want to know more then follow this link.

 It's time to head to the allotment and pick the apples that are still left on the tree after yesterdays wind and checking the windfalls for damage, I may well have some spare apples soon for people local enough to collect them from me.

I've linked this post to:-

 Welcome to the Weekend 

Photo of The Week

Hope you all have a fantastic weekend.

xxx

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A Corner Turned

Things have finally started to look up here, yesterday we popped down to the allotment to drop some bits off into our new shed which arrived a couple of weeks ago.

We had no intentions of doing any work, just picking some apples to freeze, and set things up in the shed. Sadly we've been neglecting the allotment  the past couple of weeks, what with Himself being so unwell and I've been very busy working at home on some commissions and stock for Stone Pit Crafts

Himself said he felt up to doing some weeding, I was obviously worried in case he overdid things, so I took charge of the fork so he couldn't, and whilst he did some light weeding I set about digging up the veggies that had gone to seed as we'd not been about to harvest them.

Whilst we were busy digging and weeding Badger Boo decided to eat as many of the windfall apples as he could. I can't remember if if I've ever mentioned it before, but Badger Boo is a huge lover of all things vegetable.  

This year he stole and ate all of the cucumbers off the plants at home, was secretly stealing and eating the potato's from the potato sacks and even made a start on the strawberries until I finally figured out what was going on and built some Badger Boo proof defences.

So what was meant to be 20 mins on the lottie turned out to be a couple of hours enjoying the outdoors again. Until the car journey home when Badger Boo let rip with the stinkiest botty burp ever, I can honestly say it made me feel most unwell.

I think at last Himself is finally turning a corner and starting to feel a little better, until his next operation that is. We're seeing the Specialist this afternoon, so we'll have a better idea what's going to happen soon. 

In other news the Monday night Knitting Group has gained quite a few new members over the last couple of months, we may have to move out of the snug area and into the main part of the pub soon as it is getting a bit of a squeeze in there now. The Wednesday Lunchtime group is still fairly quiet with only a couple of members, I'm wondering if the Weds group needs a change of location? 

We have a facebook group open to all, so if your a knitting and crafty type of person your more than welcome to join us, show off your projects, ask advice and connect with other like minded people.

Hope you're all well?
Take care.
xxx

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Up, Down, Round and Round

Feel like I've been chasing myself around in circles for weeks now and achieving not a lot, although I have achieved such a lot just lately.

Himself had  his operation and it wasn't a success, so he will need yet another op, but first we must see the Specialist to discuss the options. 
He's still in so much pain it's sickening, nothing helps, he's now considering going private just to get it sorted.

The whole situation is just so stressful, my O.C.D. is coming back which is causing problems mentally, but I'm trying to keep it under control. It's really hard to explain the totally feeling of dread that has blanketed me at the moment, but it is like all emotion has been sucked out of me and I'm just an empty shell.

Had my first Craft Fair which was a step learning curve but I covered my pitch costs so I'm pleased about that. I'm really busy making Christmas stock at the moment so I can post on Stone Pit Crafts website.

Found this beautiful Sunflower which has decided to grow among my Tomato's at home, quite pleased with the picture quality as I used my mobile.

Home you're all well and take care.

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Broken Promises

Where do I start? 

Every day I log on with the intention of writing a blog post and nothing gets written, so much for the promise I made to you all.
 **hangs head in shame**
Things are so good and things are so bad here at the moment.

Himself is in so much pain all the time, it's heartbreaking to see him suffering so, but at last he finally has a date for his operation, fingers crossed all goes well for him this time.

I'm due to see the Specialist next month,  I've been in so much pain with my Arthritis the last couple of weeks.
 I had the X-Rays of my knees done this week in preparation, they're looking really bad now, bone on bone in both knees and no sign of any cartilage that I could see, which explains the agony I'm in. 

Got discharged from the Physio-Terrorist yesterday, I'm really going to miss my weekly

FreeCycle, Allotment and Potato's

 At last the allotment is taking shape and showing results, do you remember how bad it was when we took it over? If not then take a look here.

The back half is still covered in tarpaulin to stop the weeds growing as not been able to devote as much time to it as we would like, with Himself going in and out of hospital and my own Bad Days thrown into the mix.

But we have made a good start and stuff is growing, others at the allotments say we have achieved a lot in a short space of time, so I guess we have.

Silent Sunday

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I've Been a Tardy Blogger Lately

Firstly I must apologise for my tardiness and hardly posting news here in the last couple of months. Things have been totally manic since I launched Stone Pit Crafts which I'm really happy about, but it has taken up a lot of my time, hopefully now things have quietened down a bit I can get back on an even keel keeping up with everyone again.



Although I am very pleased to see, each week another person joins the blog hop "Smile it's Friday" and last week was the most entries so far. If you want to join in just add your link to the post, it runs from Friday to Sunday so plenty of time to join in.

The Arthritis in my hands has been playing up a fair bit lately, as I've been over doing the knitting and finger physio to get the orders out. My good friend Lesley sent me a picture of the Welly Toppers I made for her as I forgot to take a picture **slaps own wrist** more about them will be written on Stone Pit Crafts  Handmade Monday post next week.

I got an awsome new PDF Scanner app thing on my mobile and it works really well at scanning the cards I make, for some reason I was having real problems taking pictures of them, they always looked like they were taken with a fairground mirror.

Badger Boo is well, but I fear his advanced years may be catching up with him. He's sleeping an awful lot theses days, although he's his usual mad self when awake and not slowed down at all, he'll be 12 in October, hardly seems any time ago he was such a cheeky young pup.

Next week Himself goes back into hospital for another operation, neither of us are looking forward to it, but we really hope it sorts out his ongoing problems. It's hard to see such an active and fit person reduced to a shell of his former self, in so much pain and so unhappy.

 I'm hoping to get my little car back soon, my son has been borrowing it for the last year to get to his collage course. It's been really tough without a car, but his needs were greater than mine at the time.

I hope you're all keeping well and life is being kind to you?

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Fun and Games

For my Birthday Himself treated me to a Photographic workshop run by Robert Barclay.

We had an awesome day and learnt so many new techniques. Himself got a little bored with the usual poses everyone was doing, so put his own spin on it, I was on continuous pictures so it worked pretty well.

For this to work properly you need to scroll through all the pictures really really fast, I've NOT used the full 42 pictures I took of this sequence, but pretty sure I have picked the best ones to give the effect of what he was up too.

Hope you found it as funny as we did. 

You can link up below to spread your Friday Smiles, or head over to Badger Boo's Daft Adventures where you can grab the code for the blog hop when you link up.

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Hard Work Now Showing Results

Every weekend since the middle of March except for one Himself and I have been slogging our guts out, digging our new allotment with a little help from Badger Boo although BB's help was mainly in a supervisory capacity.  

When I took our allotment over it had been left for sometime, although it wasn't in as bad an overgrown state as some of the others I looked at. Yes I was lucky, I had the choice of four. 

Looking up the plot.

Looking down the plot.

It's a big plot it's what is know as 10 rods, but our last one was very tiny and as we have such a small garden I wanted the largest I could get, so this can become our garden to sit out in as there is a fabulous community spirit there.

So we set about digging and got some Potato's  planted the first week.

Backbreaking work for Himself :o)

We quickly dug three beds in the bottom quarter, it was backbreaking work as it is over run with Couch Grass. We decided we would work the rest of the plot slowly over the rest of the year, and rid it of as much Couch Grass as we could, then really go for it next year.

As most of you know, neither of us are in the best of health, so we don't want to knock ourselves out, as then we may lose interest. Then the weather changed and the sun came out which is great after the long cold Winter we have had.

BUT

That meant the weeds and couch were growing like wildfire! So we had to cover most of them over and get the rest cut down, our lovely new allotment was looking like The Dingles Homestead in Emmerdale  compared to everyone else's. We've still got to buy a petrol strimmer, so it had to be done by hand with a pair of shears and the first assault  of "Operation Kill the Couch Grass" had began.

It was bloody hard work but we are very pleased with the results.

First part of "Operation Kill the Couch Grass"

We laid tarpaulin to kill off most of the couch grass, when it's all dead we'll dig and get the roots out as it's really resilient stuff. Himself had to sift the couch roots out of the compost, I'd been putting them in there, not knowing it was the wrong thing to do. They are now all happily drowning in the buckets of water and holding down the tarpaulins, so they can be burnt in a few weeks time, on the advice of one of the other allotment holders, they really are a helpful lot there.

A well earned cup of coffee for Himself as he surveys our efforts.

We've been offered the third shed down from our plot (in picture below) it needs a new roof as it has completely rotted but that's easily sorted. It's basically sound for an old shed, so Himself we just need to level a spot for it and find some helpers to shift it. Complete if we can as it may not survive being taken apart. Whatever happens, if it falls apart we can always rebuild a smaller shed with it's wood. I do love a challange to adapt and overcome.

We still have a lot to do, but thanks to the glorious weather over the Bank Holiday weekend we are getting there and our hard work is showing results at last. 

Very pleased with the end result, still loads more to do but we are getting there.

The Apple Tree on the allotment is now in blossom, I'm really looking forward to try out my very own home grown apples later this year. 

I wonder what type of apples these will grow into?

  Now go check out the other links to The Gallery theme The Weekend.

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Hard Work ~ Photo of The Week

At last we have got our new allotment, it is huge and runs all the way back to the fence at the end. Today we started the laborious task of digging and weeding it.

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Himself - What's the Point?

Himself came home this evening feeling rather pleased with himself, he had captured what looked like a really unusual shot of a tree in the dark surrounded by a strange aura.

He has no idea how he did it, and was unable to repeat it, as sadly it's not in focus. I think it's a pretty clever effort, but what's the point if he can't remember how he did it? It's like telling you a bit of gossip but not getting the juicy bits!

Night View No Flash.

Night View With Flash

He has absolutely no idea what he did ? BOINK **as I slap him round head for daftness**

Seriously he's starting to give me a run for my money now. Better book myself onto a photographic course ASAP as I can't have that!

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