I survived....

.... my first day at school!! I must say it is an absolutely lovely village school and I'm really pleased with the placement now. Some of my course mates had a day from hell but I had a lovely one! It's a really small school, there are only 60 pupils and it is the kind of place where everyone knows everyone - it's a real friendly and welcoming environment. My teacher mentor is fabulous with her pupils and I'm really looking forward to spending more time there and learning from her and the children!

Other uni news is that I've finally finished and submitted my geography assignment which felt like it took forever to complete! Father Christmas brought me a laminator and I had mucho fun with it making my resources for the assignment. It was actually quite therapeutic feeding the sheets through the machine lol! I'm wondering if I could make some mini clear albums with it? I stocked up on more laminate sheets yesterday anyway as I used all I had on the flash cards and games I made for my assignment! No rest for the wicked though, I have a history assignment due on the 11th. And it's a plain old essay style one too, no exciting imaginary teaching scenarios or resources to make :(

Everyone who know me knows that, in general, I'm not a very spontaneous person! However, when Lee and I get an idea in our head to do something around the house we do seem to have to do it straight away. I decided yesterday that the lounge was looking a bit tired and we could do with some new scatter cushions for the sofa, and within half hour we were trawling B&Q and Wickes for wall paper samples lol! I used to hate wall paper, but for a while now have fancied all these rich textured and bold print styles that are about. So tomorrow afternoon we'll be papering a feature wall in the lounge with a lovely brown and duck-egg floral paper. The lounge is already brown and cream, and the little injection of colour is all it needs for a fresh new look. We also picked up new cushions, which came to almost £60, a tad expensive when you're out shopping on a whim, but they are lovely and will help concrete the new scheme with what we already have in the room.

Here's a scrapbook page I made at the Pontypridd crop, it was for the crop challenge which was based on a sketch. It's another wonky and drab picture I'm afraid!! I already had the idea to scrap the woodland that surrounded where we lived as kids from the "We Dare You" book, and the sketch fitted the photos and papers I was planning to use anyway so that was fun! The photo flips out to reveal a mini book; I seem to have a bit of a thing for flaps and pull out books at the mo with my scrapbooking!!

Catch ya later xxx

Back by popular demand!!

Well no, not exactly, but I did think it was about time I gave a little update to the land of the living!

A belated happy new year to you all, I hope 2008 bring much luck, love, happiness and health to everyone.

Not much has really gone on here, hence the lack of posts, as I have mainly been extremely busy with uni. We have had a flurry of assignments, the first of which I received back today. I'm really pleased (and even more relieved) to have got an A - finally, after four months a little insight into whether I'm on the right track or not. It has been weird ploughing on through the course with no marker to measure ourselves against but I guess that will start to change as our results begin to come back to us. I think we're due our English results next. Despite having always loved English, I must admit I'm not really enjoying that part of the course and am not holding much hope of having done well on my assignment. According to our lecturer, who has completed the marking, there are a lot of fails - so I'm resolving myself to be amongst them!!

We're starting out in school next week, just one day a week for about six weeks. I'm pretty nervous about it, and also a bit hacked off that out of all the schools in the city, right on my doorstep, that they work in conjunction with, I've been bloomin' well posted to one that's in proper woolly-back land. Seriously. It's a million miles away, up a mountain, on the edge of a cliff. Where no-one can hear you scream. With nothing for miles and miles. Not even a shop to buy a sandwich. Truly.

Ah well, I guess it's the luck of the draw. I was also a little disappointed that one of my besty mates on the course was originally posted there with me, but now has inexplicably been drafted somewhere else. On our doorstep her new place is too lol!!!

We had a lovely family Christmas and new year, albeit we were all really ill with the chest infection that I'd earlier seemed unable to shake for so long. It got much worse a couple of days before Christmas eve and unfortunately I passed it on to everyone in my family and we were all pretty rotten over the festive time. The good side of it was that it totally suppressed my appetite and I actually LOST weight over Christmas. Only 2lbs which have since probably gone straight back on - but that's got to be a first right?!!!! My Christmas dinner consisted of a tiny piece of turkey, a little roasted parsnip and one sprout. And that kept me going for the next couple of days! Unfortunately my mankiness meant my camera did not come out of its case over the holidays!

I've still got a bit of a cough and cattargh whirling around my head, but I'm happy to report that I'm much better healthwise now than I was for the whole of the autumn!

Other news is that Lee and I have booked ourselves a fortnight of Autumn sunshine for later this year. We're heading off to Tenerife for a fortnight and we're already really looking forward to it because in all the time we've been together we've never had a foreign holiday. Lee has never flown before and had a lot of anxieties regarding it, so I've got a fun-filled eight months of winding him up about the terrors of take off, landing, turbulence and crash statistics ahead of me!!!! *evil grin*

I'm afraid I've been pretty lax on the scrapbooking front due to being so busy with course work. Although I have had a couple of opportunities to dust off my stash at a couple of crops. Gems, my sis and I headed up to a new crop in Pontypridd last week and had a fab time. It's run by the lovely Penny and Ally, check out their website for more information if you're ever in the area with your stash lol!!! I've got two incomplete pages which I will endeavour to finish and share soon, but for the meantime here's one of Ellie in all her Halloween glory. It's a pretty rubbish picture so you do have my apologies, more about that below!

I'm pretty sure I've blogged about my cronky PC before now. Well we finally got a lovely shiny new one in the post-chrimbo sales, and as much as I love its speed and power - this bloody Vista malarky is driving me truly bonkers! Bring on the straight jacket we cry!! None of the programmes I'm used to using for editing my pics will run in Vista, and trying to find some decent alternatives that will is proving a nightmare. Even the editing software that came with my printer is rendered defunct in the new operating system, and the alternative download they have available for Vista is absolutely pants and doesn't have half of the features of the old one in it. Bummer indeed when you edit everything within an inch of its life!!!

Righty ho, that's it for now my lovelies. I have a geography assignment with an ever-looming deadline requiring my urgent attention! I am looking forward to spending some time catching up on all in Blogdom, and promise to be back soon. xxxx