Sunday Snaps 9 - London...from the Thames

It's been a while since my last Sunday Snaps post, so here is the latest in the series.

These photos were all taken 5 years ago during a trip up to London on a VERY cold Sunday in January. We took one of the river boats that travel along the Thames, getting on at Westminster and off at Greenwich.

This first snap is of the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Bridge.

Just opposite Parliament is the London Eye. You can take what they term "flights" in the pods of this massive ferris wheel and get some great views of London. The flights take about half an hour to do a full circle and are well worth trying if you get the chance.

Perhaps the most famous bridge in the country is Tower Bridge, which is named after the nearby Tower of London. It was a little surreal to be sailing underneath this famous landmark.

The last picture for today is of the rebuilt Globe Theatre, the original of which saw many of Shakespeare's original play performances. It is a wonderful project that has constructed a faithful reproduction of the original theatre.

Viewing London from the river is a very interesting way of seeing the city and some of its most notable landmarks, but I would highly recommend not doing so on the coldest day of the year!! :-)  We do have some more pics from this trip so I may share those in another Sunday Snaps someday soon. Stay tuned!

Snow Day!

As Dori mentions in her post today, we have had significant snow here overnight, and it has continued to fall during today too. The weather has been on a cold groove since a little before Christmas, but this week has seen it get even worse. Most nights have seen a very sharp frost that has made everything look like it has been placed in an ice-box. On Monday, which was my first day back at work since Christmas, our car refused to start and I had to call out the breakdown service. The verdict was that the car battery had met its demise and had gone to meet its maker. So, the New Year started with a £70 bill for a new battery, and a late start to my working week which was exacerbated by the fact that the delay meant that I was then driving into the office during the peak of the rush hour. Ho hum, things can only get better.

The snow started late yesterday afternoon, and the forecast was for anything up to 16 inches of snow in some areas of southern England. The reality was that we got about 3 inches or so where we live by the time I woke up this morning, but even that was enough to cause traffic chaos. With the snow still falling heavily, I was fearful that if I did drive into the office then I may not be able to make the return journey later in the day, so I rang to say that I would not be able to make it in – and by the sounds of it I was far from the only one in that situation. So, today is a Snow Day! Yay!!

Dori and I decided to have a walk out to see what the conditions were like around where we live, and to take a couple of pictures to share with you all. The wind was quite icy, and we both had our hats pulled down around our ears, and our scarves pulled up over our mouths. It was like a scene from “Scott of the Antarctic”! :-) I hope that you like the pictures.

The snow continued to fall quite heavily up until lunchtime, so it is now deeper than you see in the photos, and the forecast for tonight is for possibly more snow followed by a very severe frost. So the conditions tomorrow are likely to be even more treacherous than they have been today! I brought some work home with me yesterday, so I will work from home tomorrow if I can. At the moment there is no sign of this cold stretch ending anytime soon, and there may be another heavy snowfall at the weekend.

It may be time to barricade ourselves into the Yellow House and just wait it out until the thaw!!

Yellow House Merchandise

As I mentioned in an earlier post, when we were visiting family and friends over in the States at Thanksgiving we handed out some homemade gifts and cards. You have already seen some pictures of the cards we made, and I thought now would be an appropriate time to share some photos of the gifts too. I say appropriate because the gifts were all calendars, and I am sure that you have all been hanging up new calendars this last week – or wondering when and where you will be getting one for this New Year!

These calendars weren’t entirely homemade as such, but all the photos were our own, as were some of the backgrounds, and we laid out each page of the calendars to our own design too. We then got them printed up by a company in Belgium. We made calendars to two different designs – one as a wall calendar and the other as a desk calendar.

Here are the pictures of the pages of the wall calendar.

And here are the pages of the smaller desk calendar.

                   

        

        

         

The lighting wasn’t the best when we took the photos of the pages and some are a little blurry – but you will get the idea!

We very much enjoyed putting the calendars together and we are hoping to take some more photographs during this coming year that we can use for more calendars for 2011. All being well, those will then be available to buy from our blogs sometime in the autumn. Unfortunately we cannot sell the ones for this year because we don’t have the image rights for some of the places that we have photographed.

Now, I have to go and plan some photographic expeditions with Dori !! .

Happy New Year

New Years Widget by Widgia

A Happy and Prosperous New Year to everyone!!

Merry Christmas!

Doesn’t time fly! Christmas Eve is here already and it only feels like 5 minutes ago we were over in Georgia celebrating Thanksgiving. We have spent the last few days completing our final preparations for the festive season. We have even braved the local supermarkets on a couple of occasions, where you would think that people were buying in readiness for a month’s hibernation rather than just a couple of days worth of celebration!

Yesterday we went up to London to see a play in the West End. It really made it feel like Christmas. We spent the train journey up to the city looking out at the snow-covered countryside as we sped by. The snow and frost that we have had over the last week has made this the nearest thing to a White Christmas that I can remember for a long time. Unfortunately it looks as though it will all be gone around where we live by tomorrow. Anyway, the blanket of snow over all the fields, barns and houses made for a very Christmassy scene as we travelled towards Paddington Station.

Our day in London was wonderful. We took the Tube to Covent Garden and had a bite to eat before going to the Novello Theatre to see “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof” starring James Earl Jones, Phylicia Rashad, Adrian Lester and Sanaa Lathan as directed by Debbie Allen. The play was tremendous with exceptional performances all round. We had great tickets slap-bang in the middle of the 8th row – just perfect. The show lasts for 2 hours and 45 minutes, but that time simply flew by – a sure sign that you are having a good time! After the show we went to have a meal at a nearby restaurant, which was buzzing with people enjoying a pre-Christmas night out. The food was great and served very promptly, which was a relief as we had a train to catch back to Wiltshire. We decided as were sat in that restaurant that we will have to make trips like this our new Christmas tradition, every year on December 23rd. Anything else we go to see though will have to go some in order to match that production of “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof” though!

Today we have had to stay in and wait for the washing machine engineer who is supposed to be bringing us a new machine as the last one died just after we returned from our trip to the States. We are, however, still waiting as I write these notes! Hopefully he will be here very soon as we have some Christmas movies to watch and some cards still left to finish off. I hate having to wait for deliveries and the like.

Anyway, yuletide is upon us and I wanted to take this opportunity to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas. I hope that you all have a great holiday season.

PS The new washing machine has just arrived – who said that Santa doesn’t bring exactly what you want at Christmas?!

Christmas Creations

Christmas is so very nearly upon us now. Amazingly, we are all but ready for the festivities with still 6 days to go until the Big Day. We have all the presents bought and wrapped, the Yellow House is also fully decorated and the tree has been up in place for 2 weeks now.

We have also written and sent most of our Christmas cards. When we went over to the States for Thanksgiving, we took the presents and cards for our family and friends over there. Both the gifts and the cards were manufactured by ourselves and we thought that you would like to see what we have made. Dori will be talking about the gifts in a future post, but here are some pictures of a few of the cards that we made.

We obtained all the various materials from different sources and then had a small assembly line going to get all the cards made. We used small sticky pads to make some of the elements on the cards stand out, and give a 3D effect to them. The envelopes were not lined when we bought them – Dori lined them all herself using some patterned paper. And then when the cards were all complete, we put them in envelopes and then sealed the envelopes with a wax seal. This involved melting some wax onto the envelopes and then pressing the wax with a metal stamp.

Don’t worry that I am spoiling any surprises here – we handed out the cards when we were in Georgia and everyone was very pleased to receive them. Sometimes something that is handmade can be so much more personal, and shows that some real thought has gone into it, as time rather than just money has been spent on it.

It was an enjoyable process, and we definitely got better at it as time went on! This may well be the way of the future. I can definitely see us producing more homemade products in the upcoming years. If we do, then I know we will share it all with you here.

Merry Christmas everyone.

It's Been A While

You may have noticed that I haven’t been around for a while; in fact it is three weeks since my last post here. Firstly, of course, there was our trip over to the States for Thanksgiving, which was wonderful, and since our return back to these shores we have had to contend with jetlag, a broken washing machine, illness and an internet-phobic laptop! Life has been upside down for the last two weeks, and still isn’t yet fully righted.

Anyway, all of this means that there is some catching up to do. Dori is posting a full documentation of our Thanksgiving trip over at her blog, but here are my own brief thoughts. We were in Georgia for 9 days and that time simply flew by. We had a great time while we were there and we were able to catch-up with both friends and family. We did regular stuff like visiting the mall and going to the movies, and we also ate some extremely tasty meals – both restaurant produced and home-cooked. The weather was great, for the most part, and we enjoyed a couple of walks along the local nature trail. As Dori said a number of times, it was just like our own spa retreat! :-)

As I said earlier, the time flew by and we were barely able to believe it when the time rolled around for us to fly back to the UK. It was like we had only been there for a couple of days or something. Naturally, when we arrived back at Heathrow the weather was exactly how we had left it – cold and extremely wet. But we were happy in the knowledge that the trip “back home” had been so enjoyable. We had a fantastic time and really enjoyed kicking back for a short while.

My laptop died, or at least refused to do anything internet related, just before we flew out to the States. It is now three years old, which seems to be about the most you can hope for as the useful lifetime of a modern computer. So, we had to take the plunge and order a new laptop, which finally arrived three days ago. It is a shiny black Compaq complete with Windows 7 and all. Right now I am enjoying the novel feeling of things actually working in a timely manner and not freezing up every few minutes or so. Long may that continue!

So, what else has happened during my hiatus? Oh yes, the World Cup Draw. The general view is that the draw was very favourable to England, as far as their group is concerned, although I can see some tricky obstacles further along the path should they progress. But as Fabio Capello said himself, you have to beat the best teams if you are seriously considering yourself to be in with a shout of becoming World Champions. One interesting aspect of the draw is that England find themselves in the same group as the United States. That will make for a very fascinating match-day in the Yellow House come June!! :-) Trevor is already having panic attacks about which team he should support!

Well, I think I’ve covered more than enough ground for one post – and I haven’t even got around to talking about Christmas yet! That will have to wait for another day. Have a good weekend everybody.