This Is Me

It has been great fun catching up with new friends via Vicki's (2 Bags Full) blog party she held the other week.
I have been to visit some great blogs and found many interesting things and people along the way.
If you are looking for some more blogs to follow and catch up with...then please don't hesitate to go visit Vicki and visit some of the blogs on her site.

I wrote a nice little speal about me and who I am, why I blogged etc etc and what I blog about.
Looking back on that post however it made me realize that I didn't actually put up a picture of me. I put one up of the boys but forgot myself.

So here are the latest pictures I can find. These were taken on Christmas Day.

This is me with all the members of my family. There now you know what I look like!

Useful Tip

With this hot weather we are having then everyone wants cold drinks.
No problem there, that is what the fridge is for.
However, when trying to be nice and cool the wine for your husband, it is a good idea not to forget it is in the freezer, cause we kinda found out that wine will freeze!

Who would have known! Oh and just out of interest...according to the husband it tasted alright too!

Friend Making Monday

I sometimes wonder where the weeks go? I can not believe it is Monday again already and it is in fact almost the end of January! I can't believe we are already racing through the year. Time to slow down, smell the roses (as they say) and make sure we keep up with the pace of life.

Kenlie, over at All The Weigh, likes to make friends every Monday. She puts up questions and you then answer them on your own blog and link back to hers so others can come by and get to know you more.

Anyone is welcome to join in the fun at Friend Makin Monday, whenever they feel like answering the questions, some weeks I don't get round to joining in, but most weeks I do.

 Now it’s time for this week’s topic!

Getting To Know Each Other

1. What is your favorite color? I guess I could say a dark red, maroon colour

2. Share one or more of your talents.  At the moment my talent is that I make a mean brownie

3. If you were spending the day getting to know someone new, where would you want to go?  Hamilton Gardens for a picnic, so much to see and do and plenty of time to chat.

4. What is your favorite meal?  I love a great Chinese meal but sadly all the ones in NZ are mainly take away buffets that I always find cold and stodgy.

5.  Do you prefer to text or talk?  Talk, definitely

6. Share something about yourself that might surprise someone that you’re getting to know.  My current address is my 39th in 42 years!

7. Do you color your hair? Yes.

8. Do you wear glasses or contacts?  I don't wear or require glasses.

9. What is your favorite breakfast food?  Either bananas on toast, lemon curd on toast or muesli with bananas and greek yoghurt.

10. Would your friends say that you’re sarcastic?  No, well maybe a little

11. Do you prefer salty or sweet?  Sweet…totally.

12. What is the first thing you notice about the opposite sex?  Friendly eyes

13. What is the last movie you watched?  Rock of Ages. Finally rented it the other night.

14.  Are you religious?  I believe in God, but I can’t really call myself religious.

15. Are you a neat freak, a slob, or somewhere in between? Somewhere in between however I feel like I only have to turn my back and the place is a mess again. We have been home 2 weeks, the boys have not been upstairs (apart from to sleep) in all that time, yet you can not see their bedroom floor and I don't know why!

16. Share something from your bucket list that you hope to do someday.  I would love to climb up a large crane to see the view from the top

17. Are you a risk taker, or do you prefer to play it safe?  I tend to over think things sometimes however other times I can be impulsive and just go for it

18. Have you ever worn braces?  No.

19. Would you rather spend an evening at a theater or at a club?  Oh, definitely the theater.

20. If you could have three wishes, what would one of them be?  Wealth but not masses of it. Every time we discuss the Lottery and what we would do if we won, I always say how at present I would just be perfectly happy with enough to pay off the mortgage and be able to take a nice holiday. Sure I would love to win a million but $250,000 would be happily received as I would still quite like to feel like I have to work a day or too as I know I would be very bored at home all the time not seeing people.

Thanks for stopping by, hope this gave you a little more insight into my world.

Leave me a message if you take part as I would love to swing by and catch up on more about you too.

Have a great week

Catch Up Time

Even though there has been the odd post I really haven't got totally back into blogging since the holiday time. Hopefully I can get this sorted as the pictures are mounting up in my file waiting to be loaded into a post.

Grow Your Blog Party

Firstly, welcome to all my new followers. It is so great to have you here and thank you for stopping by. You are most welcome whenever you feel like it, please don't think you need an invitation to drop on by, the door is always open.
It is lovely to meet new people and see how the other half are doing things, with this in mind I still have a lot of blogs to go and visit (something like 400 in total) so I may be busy for a little while jumping around the place saying Hi to people.
If any of you are interested in meeting some new people, then pop on over to Vicki's Place and go on a little blog hop to meet some new friends.

Work

My first week is going well and the people are making me feel right at home.
They are trusting me from the word go and so each new day I go in I am being allowed to do a little bit more. This is helpful as it is making me feel like I am there rather than spending a whole week just standing around observing and getting very bored and frustrated because I am not allowed to touch anything or anyone (patient that is)

Garden

Our garden, as I am sure you will see throughout this year is a work in progress. At some stage I will do a rather long post about our back garden and where it was when we got the house 5 years ago and where it is now.
It is easy to just say that at one point the far end was 1m lower than the top end and there were no steps to get you there, just a nice slope down.
So over the last year we have been shipping in soil on a slow basis and leveling it off. As this is a work in progress then we have also been making sure other areas of the garden are kept looking nice.
This past weekend we tackled an area that I had always wanted to get tidy but just never did anything about,
The succulents sat outside the garage.
The next 2 pictures show you the area in the distance and the mess it looked. Please note these pictures were not taken with the succulents in mind, I forgot to take a before picture at the weekend, so I went back through my files to find something that showed you the area, sort of.

There were several of them, all sat around in pots. We had had lots of succulents when we lived in Auckland 5 years ago. When we left we took little pieces of the ones we liked and potted them when we got here in Hamilton, however that is all we have done with them so they have become right at home in their pots and nothing else has happened to them, well apart from living outside the garage door that we don't use. Many of them had out grown their pot and 1 or 2 had even become root bound in the pot!

I wanted to build a wooden flower box to house the succulents in just where they were but when we started looking at it the price was slowly creeping upwards and I only wanted to keep it simple.
So I discussed with hubby what I wanted and he made a few suggestions and suddenly away we went.

As we took the chimney down a few years ago then we still have several hundred bricks in a pile around the place, so he suggested we use them. Glad we did in the end as it is now in keeping with the other flower areas around the garden.

We culled a lot of the plants as some of them had become just too big for what we required. Even though we separated them to smaller pieces we just didn't need so many of the same thing around the garden.

I got given the Pukekos as a leaving present when we moved from Auckland. I was telling the boys how I would like some garden ornaments (maybe a frog) to place round the succulent area and hubby remembered we had these. So he found them in the garage and I think they look great in their new home.

Really happy to have finally cleaned up an area that we see and pass every single day. Lets just hope the succulents are as happy in their new bed as they were in their pots.

Grow Your Blog Party

Today I am taking part in a "Grow Your Blog Party"

Vicki over at 2 Bags Full knows many people via her blog and has some wonderful friendships because of this, well electronic friendships anyway, and they are sometimes great ones to have.
So she is holding a party to enable others to find some new friends and followers, maybe even some new interests in crafts, books, places and even tips on how to blog and what to blog about etc.
The main purpose being to Meet-Greet-Grow your blog.

So today is party day and welcome to my place.
Please don't worry about your shoes as you come through the door, I am not fussy, although I have just been redecorated however the carpet is old!
I like to keep my blog background up to date with the time of year, although here in New Zealand it is summertime so I have just changed from my Christmas background to something a little more suitable.
If you like this background then you can check out more free ones over at Leelou Blogs, she is always happy to share a few freebies with friends.

If it smells nice that is because I am cooking some chocolate brownies to take with us tonight to a dinner date with some friends.
I can offer you some tea or coffee however due to the gorgeous weather we are having I thought maybe some peach ice tea with ice cubes would be better suited to the day....help yourself.

So who am I?
I am a wife and mother, oh and in my spare time I get to play nurse at the hospital.
I have been married for 4 years although we have actually been together for 13 years.
We are very lucky to have 2 adorable sons who are 7 & 9 years old.

I am English and moved to New Zealand just under 15 years ago, on my own on a one way ticket!
I decided that I had a one year visa and if I didn't like it here then I had to work hard at my nursing job to raise the money for the ticket home.
15 years later and I am still considering raising the money to go home!

I started blogging in 2005, although I only managed a few posts. I got back into it in 2006 and I haven't looked back since.
I started blogging to keep all my family overseas up to date with what the 2 little bundles in our life were up too. I didn't want to keep writing out separate emails to relatives with heaps of pictures attached, which in turn would take up time and space on their email (we are talking pre broadband, so most were on dial up at the time!)
Since then, several of my family have moved from England to New Zealand and so now I blog as a memory of life and what the family are doing. Even though my mother only lives 1 hours drive away we still manage to keep up with what the other is doing by checking our blogs!

I like crafts and have been cross stitching since I was 7, however along with most craft things, it has been on hold for a few years whilst I grew the 2 young boys in my life. Although I am suddenly gaining more time for myself and can now get my stitching out for at least an hour before someone interrupts me for something, so hopefully there will be more time for it coming my way soon.
I have also just started getting myself organised to do digital scrap booking.
I am working my way through the pictures on the computer, organizing them and also getting to grips with the scrap booking programme I am using. Layouts are very few and far between at the present moment but I am learning and hopefully more will start appearing as I get better at it all.

So this is me, this is where I can be found and I am so glad that you dropped by.
I would love you to come back and visit anytime you feel like it.
You may find I will be sleeping when you visit due to the time difference (New Zealand is so far from anywhere!) but feel free to look around and make yourself comfortable whenever you feel like it, just remember to turn the light out when you leave.

Falling Into Place

Life is falling into place for me and it feels great.

After 6+ months of unemployment and the frustrations that come with that I really feel that everything is going where I want it to go.
I have a job, got offered it more or less on Christmas Eve. 3 days a week in a department at the hospital.
Then when we returned from a wonderful 3 weeks away at the beach (more to come on this later) there was a message from a company that I had an interview with 5 months ago!
Am I still interested in their position!?
I was shocked to say the least as they had never ever got back to me at all, nada, zero, silence!

So after meeting with them during the week and then having to meet with a manager at the hospital to renegotiate things, which was surprisingly simple and all just fell into place, I have reshuffled all my hours and have the ability to do both jobs, nicely and fitting into my life how I want it to fit.

So as of Monday I start my new life, my life that I want, doing what I want, when I want to do it and believe me......it feels great.

Now I just have to work out who is doing all the cooking and cleaning around here now that I am out of the house full time again!

Friend Making Monday

If you’ve taken part in Friend Making Monday (FMM) then you know the rules.
If you’re new, please take a moment to answer this week’s question on your own blog then add your link in the comments section at All The Weigh so we can all see your FMM questions and answers.
Please invite your blog readers to add their links here too so everyone has to opportunity to be seen. The idea is to connect with other awesome bloggers so take a moment to post your own FMM post and comment on a couple of other posts. Now it’s time for this week’s topic!


Interesting Things

1. What is the last movie you saw in a theater? I saw the 2nd part of Breaking Dawn just before Christmas with a girlfriend. We both wanted to see it and no one else was interested. I had a movie voucher and we both ended up getting in for free, it was a great night.

2. How old were you when you had your first kiss? I am sure I was in Kuwait at the time, and seeing as we left there when I was a little shy of 11, then it would have been sometime around then. If not definitely before I was 12!

3. Share the coolest thing that you’ve done so far in 2013. As today is the 14th day of the year then I must have done something by now, but seeing as we have been on holiday for the first 12 days, relaxing at the beach, then there is nothing I have done. However I start a new job on the 21st, so think that will be the biggest thing yet this year.

4. What kind of cell phone do you use? Do you love it? I have a plain and simple cheap phone from Vodafone. It does nothing special apart from letting me text and talk! I do like it but don't use it to its full capacity.

5. How many times do you plan to workout this week? As I am still at home with the children this week then I should say everyday, but I know that won't happen so sadly "0".

6. What is your favorite movie from the 80′s? Oh man there are so many, the 80's was my time to watch and fall in love with the movies. Dirty Dancing probably.

7. If you could choose one character from a TV show or a movie to fall head over heels for you, who would it be? This is a tricky one. I have actually checked out others answers to this on Kenlie's blog to see what others were putting. Dirty Dancing characters are pretty high on people's list although so are any characters from period dramas.
I seem to have 56 different movies and tv shows running through my head right now but sadly I can't name one character at present, but be rest assured, at midnight when I can't sleep a character will pop into my head and I will know who it is!

8. If you could eat one food everyday for the rest of your life without gaining any weight as a result, what would you choose? Jaffa Cakes, an English biscuit with sponge and orange jelly covered in chocolate.

9. What is your favorite flower? Carnations are still pretty but I wouldn't say NO to any flowers.

10. Did you watch the Golden Globes last night? No as they are not shown here in New Zealand unless you ahve cable tv, which we don't.