Man make fire, fire good

Here's a selection of photos from the first barbecue of the year round at Sian's house. Despite the fact that all the meat had already been cooked, Ben and Hank decided that they needed to show off their manliness and make fire:



I'm loving Ben's pose on this one!

Another successful day of being a man:

Sian's garden remained more or less in tact after this display of 'machoness'. Sarah's garden at a barbecue later in the year was not so lucky after an episode involving her chimnea, a bottle of citronella oil and very nearly the loss of my eyebrows ;)

Summer highlights

To mark the end of summer I've dug out my camera and found a few choice shots from this summer. Here's next door's cat having a sleep on the manhole cover in our back garden:

Here's a great view of Menai Bridge:

This is a gorgeous one of the Snowdon mountain range. I think it was sometime in April and there was snow on the mountains but lovely sunny days and it just looked perfect.

This one is from somewhere within the mountains when we went for a drive one day.

Bye bye summer

It would seem that summer has gone. After a week or so of really nice weather for September we finally got back to some traditional Welsh weather yesterday. Yes it's raining again :( Boo! It seemed like one day it was lovely and sunny, we woke up to sun streaming through the curtains and had nice long sunny evenings then today all of a sudden it was dark when I got out of bed, I needed the light on in the bathroom and I've had to dig out a hat and scarf. No gradual change. Boom - it's autumn! On the upside though it's a good excuse to get more knitting done :)

Back in action!

I did it! After the aforementioned 6 weeks of hard graft I finally finished the thesis :) So no excuse to not keep up with my blogging now. If I had kept up with it over the last 6 weeks it would have been very boring and read something like this:

Thursday: Went to work, got home, went to office and worked on thesis, slept.
Friday: As Thursday
Saturday: Went to work, watched X-factor, slept
Sunday: As Thursday
etc...

so it's probably for the good of everyone that I didn't bother. I've already been chastised by my friend Helen for not writing often enough so I'll have to put that right now.

Speaking of Helen, her and her hubby Richard came to stay with us for a few nights this weekend just gone. We had a lovely meal at the Bull at Beaumaris on Saturday night (although the wait between starters and main course was way too long!) and on Sunday night Ben cooked us all a lovely meal - roast dinner with chocolate pudding for dessert. Yum!!! Helen and Richard checked out Conwy during the day on Sunday and gave very good reports so I might have to try that one myself.

The students of Bangor University arrived back this week and the town immediately feels more buzzy. It's certainly helping sales on the shoe department! Is it wrong of me to convince them to spend their loan cheques on shoes before it all goes on boring stuff like rent and books? ;)

All around the world

I'm currently back home in Teesside for a week and was helping my sister set up her own blog today (www.projectchintzy.blogspot.com if you're interested). In doing so I found myself checking my site meter stats and realising that I could see the location of people who have visited my humble site. I was delighted to see that there were people in places as far flung as China and Canada :) Now thinking about it, my old housemate Sian is quite the world traveller and has confessed to reading the blog before now so its probably her on both counts but I did wonder whether there might be some random readers out there anyway. If you are reading I'd love to know about it - why not leave a comment? Go on, you know you want to.

In other news I was in Leicester last week going through the last bits of my thesis with my supervisor. I found it very productive but it does mean that I have about 6 weeks of serious graft to do before I hand in mid-September. After that I promise I'll start to be a good blogger and actually post regularly and add photos when I say that I will. Until then I'm afraid it'll be the sporadic nonsense that I'm sure you've grown to tolerate ;)

Family visit

At the end of June we had a visit from my family - Mum, Dad and little sis - which gave me ample opportunity to get some sightseeing done. Here they are:

On Sunday we visited the Welsh Mountain Zoo. Although a bit chilly it was a good day out. Highlights for me were the sealions and penguins. The family got more excited about seeing a wild rabbit in the car park than any of the carefully laid on attractions but never mind ;)

Taking a very long route through the mountains to see the scenery we ended up eventually at Portmeirion on the Tuesday. Very strange place with weird coloured buildings but a nice day out. No big white balls chased after us - almost disappointing!

Other highlights of the week were a trip to Manchester to catch the rescheduled Police concert (very good although they definitely looked old!) and lunch by the pier. The family also checked out Llandudno and Chester on days when I had to work.

All in all it was a lovely week and nice to have the family over to stay in our world for a few days.

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside

One of the nicest things about living on the island is the close proximity of beaches. A couple of weeks ago (not terribly good at keeping up to date with this blog thing I know but once the thesis is done I'll be better) I got a call from Ben at about 4pm on a lovely sunny Monday to say he, Laurie and Sian were bored and had decided to go to the beach.

Half an hour later we were all strolling along by the sea at Cable Bay, eating ice cream, avoiding jellyfish and giggling inappropriately at a naked man emerging from the sea. Bliss :)