My little sister hasn’t been well over the last few weeks and I’ve been holding off sending her a get well soon package until I finished this little cushion for her,

Jane’s own family portrait; her, her boyfriend and three hamsters who sadly are no longer with us.  She is as soft about animals as I am and I thought that this would be a nice little something to remember them by.  Not her boyfriend, he’s still around, just the hamsters.

And to go with this present, some facts about my sister,

1. When we were kids she had an imaginary friend called Helen and when we argued she’d go off and play with her instead, making me very jealous.

2. She can speak and write fluent Japanese and is learning Chinese for work at the moment.  I have no idea where this ability for languages came from but it’s pretty impressive when she’s in full flow.

3. Jane makes the most amazing greetings cards and scrap books.  She can draw like your best manga artist and for some reason doesn’t sing about this ability half as much as she should do.

4. Despite the fact that she’s the younger sister and I should be looking after her, she always texts me to remind me about important dates like birthdays and anniversaries so I don’t forget.  And forget I would if it wasn’t for her.

5. She has blonde hair and blue eyes unlike me and my mum who have dark hair and brown eyes, and our dad who was ginger.  It was a common theme of our childhood to tell her she was adopted and sometimes I think she may even be considering the possibility…

Get well soon sis x

or two school days well spent…

Thank you so much dollface!

I’ve been pretty absent from the blogging world lately.  I’m in the midst of exam marking and playing catch-up constantly at work and attending various meetings and parents evenings and showing round visitors so when I get home there’s a huge temptation to just sit on the sofa and stare at the telly until bedtime.  Shamefully, this is a temptation I have been giving in to lately.

A couple of weekends ago, before the general end of term chaos begain we went back to Yorkshire for my stepdad’s 65th birthday, father’s day, and his retirement bash.  Three celebrations rolled into one which is pretty useful when you think about it really.  So thank you George!

We also went to the North Yorkshire County Show that’s just down the road from my mum’s house.  I used to love the fairs when I was a kid.  We’d enter handwriting and painting competitions through school and Aunty Eileen, our old babysitter, would spend a day with us baking fairy cakes and jam tarts for the cake competitions.  Aunty Eileen was a baker and cake maker by trade so we always had a slightly unfair advantage over the other kids who were entering.  And so it was that half way through the day we’d go and look at our entries to see where we’d be placed, collect our winnings then scatter off to spend it on mexican jumping beans and rainbow sherbert.

There were no winnings this year but there was still plenty to keep us going.  It was John’s first county show too, him being a city boy.  I think he particuarly liked the way the farm boys gathered round the sheep all excited-like.

God, I love going home x

I’ve seen a couple of people who’ve done this meme now, notably Mandy, and thought I’d give it a go.  It’s the first thing in days that’s dragged me out of the *meh* mood that I’ve been in lately so thank you ladies.

La rules: type the answers to the questions below in flickr, choose an image from the first page and put them into fd’s mosaic maker.  Oh, and don’t delete your choices three times and have to start again because you’re trying to do three things at once.  Definitely don’t do that.

Okay, I’m going to do these questions as a list; your name, favourite food, high school, favourite colour, celebrity crush, favourite drink, dream vacation, favourite desert, what did you want to be when you grown up, what you love most in life, one word to describe you and your flickr name.

And my answers; emily, lasagne, thirsk, green, donald sutherland, cranberry and orange, canada, pavlova, a writer, donald and enid, dreamy, one good apple.  Have fun and let me know if you do meme too. Oh, and hop over to my flickr for a link to photo credits x

Now I just need it to be the summer holidays and for there not to be 400 scripts that need marking on my desk at home…  Got this link from Floresita and it’s made my Monday x

Every morning on my way to work I drive past the Liverpool Dental Hospital and the set of traffic lights just outside it mean that I always have a chance to sneak at the peek at the people waiting to go in.

Having come from a small town in the middle of nowhere, it came as quite a shock to realise that NHS dentists aren’t handed to you on a platter in the city.  No more so than the time a couple of years ago when - still dentist-less - my wisdom teeth decided to act up.  Toothache is like nothing else.  When you have a stomach ache you can curl up to try and relieve it, sometimes a dark room can help a headache, but toothache?  Well that’s a different matter.

And so, at 7.30 in the morning after another sleepless night I trudged down to the dental hospital to begin the joyless task of queuing up to have my already sore mouth prodded and poked by a tired and overworked student.  I wasn’t even the first one outside, there were people ahead of me in the queue and I patiently went in, took my ticket and settled down for the long haul.

There was a happy ending of course, one that involved no blood and lots of lovely anti-biotics but I remembered my little adventure for two reasons this morning.  The first is that my wisdom teeth are having their bi-annual grumble again, when I feel like I’d imagine my new niece does now her first teeth are coming through.  The second is that when I drove through town this morning I was thinking about how I don’t really wear any make up for school because it’s not important for me to be all dolled up for a bunch of teenagers and how sometimes people can make too much of an effort for something that doesn’t really need it, I looked to my right at the hospital doors and saw a young couple dressed up to the nines, with not a hair out of place, fully made-up, waiting for the doors to open so they could have their mouths poked and prodded and examined.  And somewhere between seeing them and singing along to Paul Simon I thought, maybe I’ll wear some mascara tomorrow.  I’m not really sure what this says about me… x

It’s been ages since I’ve been back to Yorkshire and this half term I was really ready for it.  School’s been pretty rubbish lately for various reasons so going home to see my mum and get pampered has been a light at the end of the tunnel.  Anyone who thinks teachers have it easy could not be more wrong.  So, I left John and the rabbits to their own devices in Liverpool and skipped up the motorway to car boot sales, family days out at museums, all you can eat buffets in pizza hut and trips to the bank holiday markets. 

There must be something about the Yorkshire air but whenever I’m home I sleep like a baby.  Maybe it’s because I know that when I have to get up my mum’ll wake me and if I want a cup of tea or a sandwich my stepdad’ll make it for me.  And there’s never an unexpected gap where the toliet roll should be.  I’m not suprised my sister only moved fifteen minutes away, there’s something very comforting about being near your mum isn’t there? 

Whilst rummaging through the drawers at home I found some old photos that mum and I spent a whole evening uploading.  Me and mum,

my dad and me

and me again, stuffing Seabrook crisps into my mouth like there’s no tomorrow and sporting a rather dapper pair of shoes. 

And that hat.  I had a lot of clothes with my name on but apparently that hat cause quite a lot of trauma one night when we went to the opening of our new village hall only for the wind to blow my hat off into the night.  My dad searched frantically for it and even went back out the next morning to scour the fields for the thing but to no avail.  Maybe somewhere in North Yorkshire there is a sheep that goes by the name of Emily and has some very snazzy headwear.

It’s been a hot and humid day today, no sunshine but lots of heat.  And then this afternoon the heavens open.  Thunder rumbling, lightning flashing, rain pouring down in torrents.  And all the time, it’s still warm and mild and this makes the rain refreshing.  Everything perks up a little, ourselves included and we hang out the bedroom window just watching the rain and counting the gaps between the thunder and the lightning and making sure Donald and Enid aren’t too freaked out by the whole thing.  Warm rain is one of my favourite things in the world.  Just the smell afterwards is worth it, when the whole place just smells green. 

And the rain really meant staying in this afternoon so I finished off a piece of embroidery for John.  He loves astronomy and I found this sweet little pattern from The Flossbox on etsy.  I found some cheap canvases in town a couple of weeks ago so just fixed the finished object to the back of one of them and hung it in the living room.

I loved embroidering this and John enjoyed telling me exactly what colour every planet and moon and satellite should be.  A good team effort.  I’ve ironed the pattern onto some plain terrycloth which I think I’ll make into some kind of little bag.  You can never have enough bags.  I’m also in the midst of making a leaving present for one of the girls at work who’s leaving in a couple of weeks.  I do not want her to go…

I’m going to enjoy the rain a little more and get ready for school tomorrow.  And eat a chocolate brownie x

When I was a kid our babysitter used to live across the road from us and she wasn’t your typical teenage girl.  She had three kids of her own who were old enough to be left on their own when she came over to mind us.  When I was about eight or nine her daughter must have been about sixteen.  She was into The Cure and had this amazing Robert Smith hairdo, all black and long and spiky.  Of course I didn’t know who Robert Smith was, but I was in love the haircut, hers and his.

And so it was that when I went for my regular haircut at our local old ladies salon I asked my mum to ask the hairdresser (you could not imagine how shy I was as a kid…) to do my hair like Ruth’s, which in turn would make it like Mr Smith’s himself.  I’ve never to this day figured out whether my mum didn’t know what I meant, the hairdresser didn’t know what my mum meant or my mother used this unique opportunity to get the haircut she thought I should have.  But when I left the hairdressers that day I left with what could only be described as a short back and sides.

Now, I’ve never been one of those girly girls.  I like dressing nice like everyone does but I’m not big on make-up unless it’s a night out and I was never one of those young girls who insisted on having hair down their back even though it was straggly and split.  But that haircut.  Boy, that haircut.  I cried.  And cried and well, you get the picture.  Ever since then it’s been safe haircuts all the way for me.  Always below the shoulder, sometimes a fringe but always one that I could pin back and get rid of if I wanted, boring boring boring.  Then on Monday my friend came round to cut my hair and I thought to myself, well it could never be as bad as that hairdo could it?  And so I went for it.  It’s by no means a short back and sides, it’s a bob.  A lovely, shiny, curls under without me asking bob.  According to one of the kids I’m an Indie Cindy.  I am unfeasibly happy.  So happy in fact that despite the fact that I am an intelligent, professional woman, I have written an embarrassing amount of words about a haircut.  I’m going to hang my head in shame and think about what I’ve done.  And make you wait for a picture x