Easter 2018

Well didn't the long weekend just fly past, did we really just have four days off work instead of the usual two? Still, on the plus side this week is another short one for me as I am only at work today and tomorrow, Thursday is Toms birthday and on Friday we are heading up to Scotland to spend the weekend with our friends.

Image taken from www.veteransdayusaquotes.net

Despite the rubbish weather we had a nice Easter break although Tom was working some of it so we didn't get to spend the entire weekend together. We went to Bluewater on Friday to do some shopping, we both had some vouchers left over from Christmas to spend so we went to see what we could treat ourselves to. In the end Tom didn't get anything, he is saving his until after his birthday but I got a shirt, a t-shirt, a new laptop case, a book on photography and a few new Disney DVDs for our collection. We went for lunch in Tapas Revolution which as usual was fabulous, it was quite busy so we had to wait a while to get a table but it was so worth the wait. The food and service here are always first class and its now our fave place to go when we are craving a little taste of Spain. Our food choices consisted of :- chorizo cooked in cider, calamari with aoli, cherry tomato, olive and goats cheese salad, tortilla, garlic & tomato bread and patatas bravas. For dessert we shared a portion of churros with chocolate. I think the bill for all of this with drinks came to about £48.00 including a 10% service charge.

While we were at Bluewater and out of curiosity we decided to pop into Virgin Holidays to price up a package trip to Florida for next year. I am not quite sure how much we expected it to be but the total cost of doing it as a package was way more than we thought it would be, especially given that you don't actually know what villa you will be staying in. I think that if we do return we will be going DIY again, we have a couple of villas on our wish list so we need to check their availability and costs and then make THE decision!! Watch this space......

Saturday was a bit of a nothing day really as Tom worked overtime on Saturday night. We just did a quick Tesco run in the morning and I cooked us a late lunch before himself headed to work and I curled up on the sofa with Daisy and my iPad. Of course I had a couple of G&T's too, would have been rude not to!!

While Tom slept off his night shift on Sunday morning I pottered around, did a few chores and watched Aladdin before we headed over to his sisters house for a family Easter lunch. We had a lovely afternoon, lunch was a delicious roast followed by meringue's with fruit and cream and then a cheeseboard. The highlight of the afternoon was seeing our gorgeous great nephew who is now 15 months old. We don't see him as often as we should/would like but I definitely want to change this and start to see more of him as he grows up. Once we were home we spent a couple of hours catching up on vlog watching before we headed to bed. Oh I should also add that the Easter bunny came and paid me a visit, I got a lovely Lindor egg and a Easter Stitch!

Tom was at work all day on Easter Monday and was up and out by 6am! I managed a bit of a lie in then got up and headed to my craft room to have a play. I spent an hour or so catching up with Project Life and then I decided it was time to re-arrange some of my scrapbook albums. Now this was no small job as I have loads of albums, some of what cover special events like holidays etc and up until yesterday the rest were kind of sporadically split. I had one that was just layouts of us, one of friends, another of London etc, etc. The albums that are for big holidays like Vegas/Disney will stay as they are but all the other albums were emptied and the layouts are now 'filed' by year. It was a bit of a mammoth task and it ended up taking me about 5+ hours to complete but I am so happy with how my albums are, plus going forward it will make scrapping and looking back on events a whole lot easier. All I need to do now is make tags for the albums so I can see at a glance what's in each one. Tom got home about 7pm and we spent the evening having some snacks, chatting and watching a few more vlogs, it was the perfect way to spend the last few hours of the long Easter weekend.

As always thanks for stopping by to read, if you like my blog please feel free to leave me a comment to let me know you have been here. If you have a blog of your own leave a link and I will pop by to check it out.

Love and hugs, Jane xx

Easter 2016

Evening all, hope you are all well and that you have all had a wonderful Easter. I cant believe its now Easter Monday and that the holiday weekend is almost over. I have to say that its been a pretty good one here with us despite the days prior being full of emergency dentist visits and head colds (both of which I hate having to deal with!).

Good Friday was spent shopping at Bluewater where I treated myself to a new top from the White Stuff sale, some blue suede Converse and a pair of jeans. Afterwards Tom decided to treat us to a bite to eat and after much deliberation we opted for our favorite which is tapas. We used to have a great local Spanish restaurant but sadly they closed a few years back and as yet we haven't found anywhere to rival the food, service and atmosphere that we used to get at Rebatos. However last year we tried Tapas Revolution which is located in the Bluewater shopping mall and we were pleasantly surprised. The food is really good and the service is great too, there is only a certain amount of atmosphere as you are in the middle of a shopping mall but it does the trick now now when we need a fix of all things Spanish. We came home and spent the evening watching our old Vegas DVD's whilst trying to decide on where to go next year on our American road-trip. At the moment we are torn between doing Tennessee or Route 66.....think there will be lots more research and investigations needed before we can come to a final decision.

On Saturday we did a little bit of food shopping and then chilled out for a few hours at home as we were off to Toms sisters house for a evening of Mexican fun. It was a good night, we all had sombreo's and fake mustaches to wear and Linda had cooked up a whole load of chili con carne, nachos, fajitas plus there were tequila slammers and margarita's on tap. Luckily as Tom was driving we managed to avoid the alcohol,however the same cant be said for the rest of the guests...I am sure there were a whole lot of sore heads yesterday morning. We left them dancing around the conservatory knocking back shots of whatever they could find!!

Easter Sunday came far too early for my liking, who's idea was it to put the clocks forward this weekend???!!. We had my family over for the day so I prepared a nice big buffet and made some chocolate Easter cupcakes. I used to bake a lot but had kind of given up till I was given a Kitchen Aid a few months ago. Since them my passion has been re-ignited and I am happy spending time in the kitchen baking up all sorts of things. Below is a picture of the cakes I made. I even experimented with some molds to make the little fondant flowers and dog.

Today has been a much more sedate affair. After a little lie in I have spent the most part of today in my craft room. I made two cards, one for a friend who is getting married tomorrow and one for our new neighbors who came to introduce themselves on Saturday. I had a little tidy of my room, put some layouts away and managed these three below.

This one is for our Vegas 2015 album and the pictures are of our room in the Venetian Resort and Casino. The papers are from the Bo Bunny Star Crossed collection.

The next one features a picture of my friend Sarah and I last year in Trafalgar Square, just before Christmas. Sarah came to stay with us for the weekend and join Tom and I on our annual walk around London to see the Christmas lights. It was a lovely evening that was made even more entertaining by us seeing hundreds of people dressed up as Santa (most of whom were very, very drunk).The papers I used for this are some very old SEi ones, they have been in my stash for years and years......yay to me finally using them!! I added some gems and a Prima swirl to make it sparkle a little.

Finally the last one for today is a picture of my lovely little Daisy dog. The papers and embellishments are all by Prima, to be honest I wasn't really sure about these papers at first but I really like how this has come out.The 'Princess' title which fits perfectly with the page is another old item, its a Jolees embellishment that I picked on one of our first trips to Vegas I think. 

So that's it, Easter is almost over but its another short week for us this week as  we are off to the New Forest for a few days. 

Thanks for stopping by,

Jane xx