Friday, September 24, 2010

An Escape From Plumbing Hell

Hi everyone. Brit Boy here just dropping by to make sure that everything is still tidy around the Yellow House :-) And also to give you all an update on what has been going on in the last few days.

We have spent most of the week, indeed most of the last month, waiting for our shower to be fixed. I mentioned over at my blog a few weeks ago, that the plumbing in the Yellow House leaves a bit to be desired, and yet again we have had issues with our electric shower. This is a shower that is only a few months old too, having been installed when the previous one fell into such disrepair that we were told we would be taking our lives in our hands if we used it!! The new shower worked fine for a while, but then a few weeks back the shower head started to fall apart every time we used it. So we replaced the head ourselves, at our own expense, only for the wall unit to the start gushing water from the bottom with next to no water now emanating from the head.

At this point our hearts sank. We knew that this meant dealing with the property agents, and through them with our landlord. Past experience has taught us that this would be a tortuous process, and indeed this time was no different. To cut a very, very long story short, I am now sat here four weeks later – yes you read that right FOUR weeks later – waiting in for the plumber to finally come and install a new electric shower. The list of excuses has been laughable, but at least something finally appears to be happening. What our phone bill will look like when it comes I dread to think as I have had to call the agents virtually every day to force them into some kind of action. Apathy doesn’t even begin to come close to describing their attitude.

Okay, sorry, rant over now! To take our minds off of our interminable plumbing woes, Dori and I decided to go to the movies this week. We are probably the last two people on the face of the earth to see Toy Story 3, and so that is what we plumped for. We apparently watched it in glorious 3D, but I have to say that I really didn’t see that. I guess the picture looked like it had a little more depth to it, but there wasn’t enough of a difference to me to warrant an extra £1.50 on the ticket price. Anyway, that being said, we had a great time and thoroughly enjoyed the film. We even had a KFC beforehand. Don’t tell me we don’t know how to live the high life!! :-)

Oh, and one last thing before I go. I want to wish Dori a very Happy Anniversary!! It isn’t our wedding anniversary, but the day of another important event – one that changed the course of both of our lives. I will leave it to Dori to tell you what that is, if she so wishes, when she returns.

Have a great weekend everybody!

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Taking a Break For a Bit

Hey there! :-) I just wanted to write a short post to say thank you to all of you who come here to read my blog. I really appreciate your comments and support. When I started blogging two and a half years ago, I had no idea of the path that this would all take. As I’ve written here before, I started this blog to change direction a bit in my life. I started writing here from a tough place in my life. I was nursing the residual physical ache of an injury and the emotional ache of grieving for my mom.

Blogging has been a wonderful creative outlet for me and helped rekindle my love of writing. It helped me to put my mind on other things besides how I was feeling at the time. And it went a long way in helping me not feel so isolated in this new land. I have made some connections with some wonderful people through blogging and I cherish those connections.

I’ve just passed the two and a half year mark in blogging. And I know that there are those out there who have been doing it a heck of a lot longer than I have and my hat’s off to them :-) Lately though, I’ve been fighting a serious case of blogging fatigue, so I’m going to take a little break from blogging for a month or so. I need to get away from it a bit and smell the roses as they say. I find that I struggle with writing here and I’m burnt out. I guess you can maybe tell by some of my posts ;-)

I’m going to take this time to reflect and come back hopefully with something new to say here :-) And I hope that I’ll have renewed passion about writing overall. It has been lacking a bit lately. All of my creativity seems to have run dry.

During my little break, Brit Boy may occasionally drop in to post here, as he is my favorite guest blogger :-) . I didn’t twist his arm or anything. He volunteered to steer the wheel around the Yellow House for a while ;-)

I know you can't hang around here forever, but I hope to see you all again when I return to this keyboard at the Yellow House.

Until next time… :-)

Monday, September 13, 2010

The Road Not Taken and an Award

Hello there. In another post, I said thank you for an award that I was given and I mentioned that I would post the other one in a future post. Well today is that day :-) I always feel a bit funny when I receive blog awards. Even after two and a half years of blogging, I’m always amazed that people pass these along to me and still read my blog. Lol. And this isn’t false modesty talking here...no...I’m truly surprised and very appreciative every time I get a blog award. It’s nice to get a friendly nod from within the blogging community.

Therefore, I want to say thank you to Lis at “An American Girl in Bristol” for passing the Cherry on Top Award along to me.

Lis is embarking upon a similar path to mine so I truly wish her well and hope that her move across to England is a wonderful one! :-)



This is an interesting award because it comes with an intriguing question attached to it. Here are the rules:

1) Thank the person who gave you this award.
2) Pick 6 people/blogs and give them this award.
3) Inform the person that you have given them this award.

Then...answer this question:

If you had the chance to go back and change one thing in your life, would you and what would it be?

Well, I thought about this and I know they always say that the path that you take in life leads you to where you are right now, and if you change one thing you change many things. And a lot of the time people will say that they wouldn’t change a thing and some days I would say that too. However, there are some days when I’m honest with myself and I would say, YES I WOULD change this one thing. I guess it's the adventurer in me :-) I think that it’s fun sometimes to wonder about what things would be like if you’d taken that road instead of the one you actually took. I don’t dwell on it, but hey, a daydream is good from time to time :-)

Anyway, so if I could go back and change one thing in my life, I would change where I went to school after I graduated high school. I had been accepted at an art and design school and didn’t go because I was very young and bent to the pressure of some advice. (I hold no grudges about this advice…water under the bridge and all that) I wanted to study interior design in this program which dealt with it in the home and business settings. And my ultimate goal was to study on the west coast and then work my behind off and get into doing set design and work behind the scenes on movies and television. California was calling my name! :-) This interest in working behind the scenes was fueled early by my love of all things creative and my love of classic movies. I know that it would’ve been a tough thing to break into, but it would’ve been wonderfully freeing to have just given it a try, even if it didn’t work out. I’ve learned one thing from that road not taken…there is no harm in trying, because no matter however it turns out, you get satisfaction out of knowing that you got to do what YOU wanted to do.

I ended up going to a “normal” university and it didn’t work out so well. And I guess some would say that I could’ve went along the other path later, but as we all know, life starts to happen and sometimes you never catch up :-) Oh well. I think that that is why nowadays I’m doing my best to seek out more of a creative life for myself several years later. I didn’t take that other path, and I’ve put that to rest, but now I’m going at that creative life from another direction.

Oh and in case you’re wondering where Brit Boy would have fitted within this west coast life path…well I fully believe that we would’ve still connected. I figure if we found each other 4,000 miles apart, then there’s not that much of a leap to find each other in California somehow. The Universe had it all mapped out I believe ;-) Brit Boy believes this too.

I’m gonna bend the rules again and just give this one out to everyone who wants to have this award and contemplate this question or not :-) So please take it and have fun with it…until next time!

Saturday, September 11, 2010

Remembering...

Today I want to remember all of those who were lost on 9/11...at the Twin Towers...the Pentagon...and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

They cross my mind from time to time and remind me to never take life for granted.


Wednesday, September 08, 2010

An Award & Ten Things

Over the last few days, I’ve received two blog awards and so today I’d like to say thank you for one of them and share it. And in my next post I will share the other award. The first award is from Tink at Tinkerbell. She has a wonderful and magical blog, so please do stop by when you can and visit her. Thank you Tink for passing this award along to me!

The award is the ‘A Blog With Substance’ award and I’m truly honored to receive it.


The rules are:
1) Thank the blogger that gave you the award.
2) Sum up your blogging philosophy, motivation,& experience using ten words.
3) Pass the award on to ten other blogs.

Okay, so now to sum my blog up in ten words…well. I guess my list would go like this:

1) personal – My blog is about my personal journey

2) truthful – I strive to be real here

3) gratitude – I hope that my gratitude for life shows through

4) happiness – Even though no one’s life is happy every day, I hope I share some joy here

5) nature – I love sharing photos of nature, from here in England and back home in Georgia

6) life – I do my best to celebrate life here

7) love – My love for Brit Boy and my family is here and I hope that love is always seeping into the cracks everywhere here :-)

8) journeys – Well Brit Boy and I always share our trips & the life journey is fun too!

9) colorful – I hope that my photos are representative of this

10) beauty – I have used hope a lot in describing my list and it isn’t really from a place of doubt. It’s because I love that word ‘hope’, because it is an optimistic word to me. And I hope that my love for the beauty of people and the world somehow comes through in my blog :-)

I followed the rules a bit and gave my ten words, even though I know I wrote other words. But hey, what can I do…I love words ;-)

I couldn’t decide upon ten blogs because I find so many blogs of substance out there nearly every day. So in order to share this award, I’d like to give this award to all of you out there reading this. Thanks for reading. Feel free to take this award and pass it along to the many blogs that you love :-)

In my next post, I’ll post the other award and it asks for me to reveal if there is one thing in my life that I would change. Hmmm. I’ve got my thinking cap on….until next time :-)

Friday, September 03, 2010

The Moon and Happy Feet

It’s a beautiful sunny Friday here in Wiltshire. It seems that nowadays we get all of our beautiful weather in September instead of during the summer months. Better late than never I always say :-) Although while I was gone home to Georgia in June, Brit Boy tells me that the weather here was lovely. He blogged about it here. So I'm making up for missing it then. I’m soaking up as much of that vitamin D as I can.

This is gonna be a random post…I forgot to mention that in the opening :-) Okay, so I can’t remember if I’ve written here before about how much I love the moon and can gaze at it forever. I’ve always been intrigued by it and its beauty has the power to just stop me in my tracks when I catch sight of it. I’m sure that many of us have been enticed by a full moon or two or a few hundred in our lives. There is just something about that beautiful orb up there. When I’m gazing at our beautiful moon, I often think of the longevity of it and how my parents, grandparents, and all of the people who have ever lived on this planet have seen that same moon throughout their lifetimes. It makes me instantly feel connected to humanity through the ages. And I don’t just get excited by the full moon…oh no…I love the crescent moon too :-) It’s all amazing to me!

So last night, I was fiddling around with my camera and trying to photograph the moon because it looked like I could reach out and touch it. Well I did miserable at it. LOL. To tell you the truth I wasn’t really trying. It was late and I wasn’t using a high powered camera. I was just fooling around. I’m easily amused as I’ve mentioned before and I’m a night owl, so I just let it flow ;-) The photos turned out blurry and weird, but I like the eerie way it looks. So I want to share one of them anyway, just for a Friday laugh. LOL. And no, I was not drunk. LOL.



In other news, I’ve received a couple of comments here and on Facebook about my shoes that I wore on our trip to London last Saturday. Let me tell you, I LOVE those shoes!!! :-) They are so comfortable! For all you bloggers out there, you know how sometimes you get a meme or something and it asks you to tell something about yourself? Well my choice of footwear is something I’d like to share ;-) As you will notice from the photo, these shoes don’t have laces on them and they are my absolute favorite shoes. You know why? Because I really dislike untying and tying shoe laces. LOL. I'm sure there's some psychological reason behind this, but it doesn't faze me...I guess I would just say that I like ease in life and there are other things to think about besides my shoes ;-)


I learned how to tie my shoes many moons ago like everybody else, but I have developed this thing about not bothering with tying shoe laces. Even when I wear other sneakers, I will wrench them onto my feet somehow so I won’t have to untie them. LOL. I know…I'm a quirky chick. LOL.

So when I found these shoes I was in love!! ;-) Actually, these are the second pair of this style of shoe for me. Here’s the old pair that I still wear even though they’re a bit worn out now.



Interestingly enough, I bought both pairs of these shoes on visits home to Georgia, a few years apart. I bought the beige ones at the end of 2006 and I got the black ones when I went home in June. They are Skechers brand and they make my feet happy. They look nice on the foot and the best part is that they just slip onto my feet. Now isn’t that a beautiful thing ;-)

So this is the end of my random post and I will say here, that I was not paid to say something nice about these shoes or compensated in any way whatsoever. I just felt like sharing some info about these shoes, because you never know…there may be others out there who just don’t like tying their shoes either ;-)

Have a great weekend everyone and to all the folks back home in the States, have a Happy Labor Day weekend!!!!