Cottage Cream & Portland Stone

The painting continues a pace (because I am actually paying a painter to do this bit!)
The exterior of the house is currently being painted. I googled and googled paint schemes for Tudor style houses - hard to find anything other than the traditional white and dark wood. There were a few ideas out there - this and this and this but not many and mostly of colours were named they were from the US - so no help to me in the Antipodes! So with the help of a book from the library a few googled images and my trusty Dulux exterior paint colour chart - I chose Portland Stone and Cottage Cream (which is the same colour as the interior of the house). So far, so good. Plus I found a great painter - he works like a Trojan and is very neat - so it's all going swimmingly. Can't wait for the final look. The windows look so much better even just in light grey undercoat (to kill the dark varnish on the windows). Here's where we started.

Just to remind you - here's what we started with

So far we've had the roof and guttering redone and removed one tree fern (they are stubborn buggers). Will show you the big reveal next week when the cherry picker has been delivered so that Chris (the painter) can reach our bedroom window. The land slopes away sharply on that side (you can't tell because of the bushes). Looking at this picture I am also keen to get that driveway cleaned off too with a gurney.

Alice In Wonderland Redux

Discovered a new blog which I think is pretty gorgeous - I particularly like this post about Alice In Wonderland for a birthday party. Been there done that AND got the tee-shirt but love the pics in her post!

I should ALSO add that one of my followers is the Mixed Media Mischief Makers blog group who are currently hosting all things Alice at their blog here.

Always will love all things Alice!

Feeling Very Middle Aged......

I was having a moment today (don't worry - it's passed) where I was feeling middle-aged and largely irrelevant. You know those days when you feel like you're not sure where all this is going and you lose that inner knowledge of who you are and why you're here?
Anyway in between having a moment, a glass of Pepsi Max and checking out bloglines - I came across this. Now I can't embed it into this post because it wasn't possible - but seriously - go to YouTube and check this out. For those who know me - you know I don't cry easily - but this really got to me because here's this 47 year old, unemployed, never been kissed spinster with a cat called Pebbles who has stepped up into her extremely improbable dream and - well - you have to watch and see what happens next.

Gold - pure Gold. Thank you Susan Boyle for being on this earth and being so brave & such an inspiration! You are beautiful!

The Secret Omnibus Inspector of Paris

Some things just tickle my fancy. I was doing some family history research and read the following story in an old newspaper - you couldn't make this stuff up!

The Edinburgh Evening Courant Sep 13 1867

An Eccentric Traveller - The Paris correspondent of the Express is responsible for the following:- Most of the omnibus conductors in Paris, more especially those on the line from the Barriere du Trone to the Palais Royal, have been for years familiar with the face of a little old man with a cheerful look, sparkling eye, and grey hair, who literally passed half his life riding in omnibuses. This eccentric individual always got into the first omnibus which left the quarter in which he lived at seven o'clock in the morning. He went in the first instance, to the Palais Royal, and then somewhere else. He took half an hour for his breakfast, and an hour for his dinner. The rest of the day he passed in omnibuses, and he always contrived to get a number in time for a seat in the past omnibus from the Palais-Royal to the Trone at midnight. He sat whenever he could in a corner next the door, so that he might talk to the conductor, and he betrayed visible vexation when he could not get that place. On getting into an omnibus he always asked for a "correspondence" - i.e, a ticket entitling the bearer to ride for nothing on some other line - but he very seldom made use of it. His habit was to put the ticket in his waistcoat pocket and pay afresh in the next carriage. Two days ago, after taking his dinner in a third-class restaurant which he frequented in the Rue de Ville, he asked the waiter to let him sleep a little, but begged him particularly to wake him in half an hour, as he had to take the omnibus for Batignolles. When the waiter, with the punctuality due to a regular customer, came to wake him he shook him by the shoulder in vain. The little old gentleman was dead. The doctor called in certified that he had been carried off by an apoplectic stroke. The domicile of so great an omnibus traveller was easily found. It turned out that he was a native of Nantes, whose head had been turned by his coming unexpectedly into a considerable fortune. He was under the delusion that he was a secret inspector of omnibuses, whose duty is to to about and report the passengers, with a view to discovering frauds on the part of conductors. 1500 omnibus correspondence tickets, carefully sorted and labelled, were found in one of his drawers.

Good Friday, Channel 7, 12pm

That's when I'll be on the tv folks - see you then!