just for the record

if you happen to stray in here you can not only visit my new blog but you can find me at www.hageltoast.co.uk too.

come and play!!!

click the title of this post to be instantly transported to where i can now be found!!
Thanks for dropping by!

I'm going through Changes!

http://hageltoast.typepad.com/seeking_xanadu/

I am moving. Possibly, at the moment I am enjoying the 30 day trial period, but I gotta say I am liking the extra features. Any chance you'll follow me?

Simply Wonderful!

I like to sometimes wonder through random blogs, it's how I came across Nelly's Garden and One More Cup, and now I have found this
http://smartsimplewoman.typepad.com/
for those of you who like Flylady, but found her, frankly a bit pushy, this is a much gentler form of the same basic principal, how to simplify your life to allow more time for you!

Also, what's really wonderful is that Nik has finally gien in and joined us... yep , my one of my old Uni mates is finally blogging. Woot Woot!!!
http://jadis-nt.livejournal.com/

If you guys have any favourites you visit that you'd like to share with the rest of the class, i'd love you to leve them in the comments.

Dipstick!!

Seriously, I am... I just realised that on Thursday I am away, which is fine except that I hounded people ruthlessly to attend a meeting on, yup, thursday. I just got laughed at by one of the attendees when she got my somewhat sheepish email.

Otherwise, the week hasn't started badly. I am very tired as the heat is still stopping me sleeping properly, but I am loving all the sunshine in the day. Mark and I had a lovely weekend, we went to Charlecote Park which is a fantastic national trust house which wonderful outbuildings and grounds. It's licensed for weddings. *looks around innocently*. We then had a pub lunch at a really lovely pub, got caught in a horrific thunder storm, were stuck in traffic for a couple of hours due to a couple of feet of standing water on the main road (sheesh, you'd think we'd be used to water) and got home in time to relax for the evening.
Sunday we went for a swim, Marks first time at the leisure centre nearby. It was lovely, really enjoyed myself.

Of course it's swimming again tonite, with Anna and Jo LV, fat club swimming. :)

meme

c'mon, copy, paste, alter and leave on your own blog for the rest of us.

Four Things that you may not have known about me.....

A) Four jobs I have had in my life: No order of preference!
1. KFC food server
2. Office Manager
3. Team Assistant in Traffic
4. Transport Engineer
B) Four movies I would watch over and over:
1. Rocky Horror Picture Show
2. The Lost Boys
3. Serenity
4. Batman Begins
C) Four places I have lived:
1. Near Fenny Drayton
2. Newcastle
3. North Shields
4. Leicester
D) Four TV shows I love to watch:
1. Buffy/Angel
2. Grey's Anatomy
3. Bones
4. Firefly
E) Four places I have been on vacation:
1. Holland
2. Denmark
3. Wales
4. Germany
F) Four websites I visit daily:
1. my blog
2. loads of other peoples blogs
3. www.peaceandlove.org.uk (festivals in the UK and Europe)
4. my space
G) Four of my favorite foods:
1. Pasta
2. Pizza
3. Cheese
4. Chocolate
H) Four places I would rather be right now:
1. Home - in bed
2. camping
3. in the pub
4. at the pictures (air con)
I) Friends I think will respond:
1. Anna
2. ?
3. ?
4. ?

Make hay!

I grew up on a small holding, i may have said this before. A small holding is rioiughly speaking, between 1 and 1000 acres which are used for small scale farming. Over a thousand acres can usually be considered a working farm, a small holding should provide produce for the family and maybe a little over to trade. When I was very small we had a dairy herd, sheep, chickens, rabbits (bred as food), and orchard, a vegetable and fruit garden and we grew hay. This all got scaled down bit by bit over the years till there qwere 30 sheep and hay, then nothing, in its place we moved towards having a livery stables, where people could pay for the use of fields and stables for their horses. Mum had bred horses at one point and we loved having them around, all the girls in the family rode.

So, why am i saying this now, well it's the heat; no it's not messing with my head, it's just all this hoopla about how we have actually ad a couple of hot dry weeks and it's the greenhouse effect and things, but weather goes in cycles. I am not disputing the negative effect on the environment of our short term and selfish living practises, but as for this summer, when I was young, and we used to make hay you paid attention to the sun, your livelihood depended on it.

As I say weather goes in cycles, we would have two or three years where the sun came for two or three weeks, blazing down, the skies were clear and we could get the hay in at the perfect time in perfect conditions with minimum stress, then you'd get two or three years of having to jump on three days where it didn't rain and hope for the best or risk not getting it in atall, i remember shifting bales till midnight to get them all off the field and covered, and mum anxiously phoning up for the 5 day forecasts and worrying about every desicsion. For a few weeks every summer the weather ruled our lives.

Just saying really, I find it odd how people react to a little sunshine.

The blogging phenom!

I have just been reading in the Metro (free paper) that a quarter of webheads in the UK are blogging, yay us!! lol
It also gave a very brief explanation of how to blog, it suggested as one of the items to write about something which you know a lot about and other people don't to carve out a niche.
Well I don't know about you, but i don't blog in order to carve out a niche and be fabulously intelligent on a particular subject (just as well really). I blog pretty much for the hell of it, but nice to know how many of us are doing it.

Opening up the floor

It's another scorcher today and I am thanking all sorts of false gods (couldn't resist that Jazzer) for the air con at work, my house is a furnace so i have been getting about 4 hours sleep a night all week and am shattered, but loveing the sunshiny days.

Anyway, since nothing very exciting has happened this week - i went swimming with Jo LaVey and Anna, and last night Anna came to clean (yes, i caved and hired a friend to help, she's a neat freak so its all good) so i now have a shiny clean proch, even Eryk and Yorick, my concrete and plaster skulls got a polish (altho' i thought the webs and bits of spider added authenticity).

So I thought i'd open the floor to the readership for todays post. You may remember at Roskilde I was very dissapointed to see Axl Rose suck majorly, all the fucking about, hardly any tracks, even classics like Sweet Child performed at a mediocre level. The official excuse was he was having to take oxygen, well so did Dee Snider and i've seen twisted sister twice now and Dee still blasts out the best live performance of anyone, ever!!!

Sooo, my question to you all is what long awaited and anticipated live event has been a HUGE dissapointment to you, and what has been a plesent surprise?

By live event it doesn't have to be music, just has to be something you bought a ticket for and were really looking forward to.

Lady godiva

cribbed from a history website, for those unfamiliar with this english legend.

LADY GODIVA
Some 900 years ago an extraordinary occurrence took place on Market Day in the English midlands town of Coventry.
Two monks at St. Albans Abbey in Hertfordshire first recorded this amazing story in Latin. Roger of Wendover wrote of it in the twelfth century and Mathew Paris in the early thirteenth century.
As the Abbey stood at an important road junction, it would seem that the monks may have heard the story from travellers who were on their way from the Midlands to London.
This astonishing tale that has come down to us through the centuries is that sometime in the eleventh-century a proud, pious lady rode through Coventry on Market Day completely naked, covered by nothing but her long hair!
Was this true? Apparently so!
Who was this pious medieval streaker?
Lady Godiva was the lady, wife of Leofric, the Earl of Mercia.
Earl Leofric was one of the all-powerful lords who ruled England under the Danish King Canute.
Lady Godiva was a rich landowner in her own right and one of her most valuable properties was Coventry.
Leofric was a tyrant, he tyrannised the Church and did not hold the same religious convictions as his wife, nor her fondness for the Midlands and its populace.
Lady Godiva by John Collier Courtesy of the Herbert Art Galleryand Museum, Coventry
He mercilessly demanded from the people of Coventry an oppressive tax called the Heregeld. This tax paid for King Canute's bodyguard and Leofric made sure that the people of Coventry paid it!
Lady Godiva pleaded with Leofric to stop this hated tax and he is reputed to have said, "You will have to ride naked through Coventry before I will change my ways".
He was quite sure that his demure, modest wife would never do such a thing.
But, Lady Godiva took him at his word, and on Market Day in Coventry she rode naked, veiled only by her long golden hair. As her hair was long enough to cover all her body, only her face and legs could be seen.
Leofric was so stunned by the whole incident that he believed it was a miracle that no one had seen his wife's naked body, and he immediately "freed" the town from paying the hated Heregeld, and at the same time ceased his persecution of the Church
Leofric appears to have undergone a religious conversion after this incident and he and Godiva funded a Benedictine monastery in Coventry where they were both buried.
Unfortunately all traces of this monastery have long since disappeared.
By the seventeenth-century the story appears to have been altered slightly. The new version of the story said that before her 'ride', Godiva sent out messengers to go throughout the town insisting that all the people stay indoors with their windows shuttered on the day. As she was very popular with the people, (unlike her husband,) and every taxpayer realised that they stood to gain from her 'heroic act', they did as she requested
Everyone complied with her request except for one man who couldn't resist peeping, a tailor, 'Peeping Tom'.
He was, the story goes 'blinded by the wrath of Heaven' for his temerity in not obeying the order.
A statue, supposedly of Peeping Tom, a strange wooden effigy, can be seen in Coventry's Cathedral Lanes Shopping Centre. The eyes in this effigy appear blank, but that may be because the paint has worn off over the years.
The annual Coventry Fair kept alive the Godiva story until the Reformation when the festival was banned and it was not revived until 1678.
From this time on Godiva rode through the streets on a snow-white horse, accompanied by a man whose chief skill lay in his ability to make rude, suggestive gestures. Peeping Tom again!! The Godiva Procession has been revived in recent years and takes place annually in June (please see below)
Today a visitor needs only to look in front of Coventry's Cathedral Lanes Shopping Centre to see a replica of the sight which tradition insists struck Peeping Tom blind!
Useful Information:
The Godiva Festival
Lady Godiva is remembered each year with a Godiva Procession through the town.
More details: www.coventry.org/godiva

Ed- sadley the godiva statue in the city centre, which my freinds and i use dot sit on at lunch time is now fenced off, this came as something of a dissapointment.