May Photo a Day

I am on a roll so who knows when I will post again! Flying off to Hamburg early tomorrow morning for the day so wanted to get some of the photos on here. We are doing a Photo a Day in May - I am loving it! The UK weather was not playing along until today when we had blue blue sky and it was warm!!

Some of the photos are straight out of the Camera. The freaky weather one was amazing - I was on the phone and stood up and the sky was incredible! It was raining so dark clouds mixed with Pink and Orange! I took photo whilst on the phone so camera was on Auto. The flash went off which is why the flowers look so bright! May 2 and 3 photos - as the weather was naff, I ended up using a lot of different actions to get the different effects. The Mexican plate photo I took indoors again because there was no sun! Used some actions on it too. Went walking in Richmond yesterday and took a photo of a plaque with information on the old Richmond Palace. And today's one combined a storyboard. Top photo I took this morning at 8.30 am from my office window. At 4.30 the river floods (it's normal as Richmond is tidal) so took another photo as a comparison!

Blogging??? What's that??

Oh dear, I cant believe I haven't blogged since 23 March! Where do I start! Well most of April was DID so that put me way behind, in fact I am still so behind I wonder when I will catch up! The challenges - hmmmm, missing to do 3 of them! Visiting all my friends blogs - feel soo bad because haven't done that either! Hopefully I can start to catch up one of these days!
So what's been going on? I will try to keep this short! DID is what happened, plus travelling a lot for work, away for a couple of weekends!
Oh yes, did my challenge which was a scraplift and blending Layout. Slide show below shows some of my DID layouts, plus the scraplift and Lola's May Calendar.

Once a week

OK, haven't done too badly as only updated it last week, so here is another catch up. First of all, thank you so much to all of you who have sent me lots of love and hugs and prayers for my mum. As you know I had to rush her into hospital last Sunday night at midnight. She is still in hospital but is doing much better and on Tuesday we are moving her to a rehabilitation hospital for another week and hopefully on 31st March she can go home. But she moves from her house to a flat on the 8th of April, so Hayde and I will be doing the move.

Guard Cat
Little Lucy is the guard cat of my flat! She does not let any other cat through the cat flap (apart from Gingerblokeycat coz he was twice her size lol). So here she is after having seen a black cat in the patio approaching the cat flap:

and here is her view (sorry its blurred, it was not an easy photo to take!!)


Challenges
I am really enjoying our weekly challenges and I am one behind (the home one). Did the white space one of Lucy which I loved :

But then realised that I had totally forgotten to use the colour swatch! And as Lisa pointed out, I needed to do a layout of Honey so that she didn't feel left out, here it is, using all the colours in the swatch (Liv, Lisa, do I get a prize??)


Introducing Barney!!
My best friend Di lost her cat Zac to illness a week ago, we were all sooo very sad - he was a lovely cat and so loved. They decided to visit a cat rescue place and came home with Barney!!

Isn't he cute??? He is 10 years old and a Persian and wasn't treated very well by first set of owners. Passed him on to a new set of owners who could not keep up with brushing him daily and his fur ended up all matted and bad and they shaved it! Then took him to the cat rescue place where he has been since January. No one wanted him because they thought he looked horrible! I think he is adorable! What do you think? So Di and her DH took him home on Friday and he is settling in well!
Oh yes, and doesn't he look like Animal from the Muppets!!

Catch up - warning long post!!

Eeeek, can't believe it's nearly a month since I update my blog! How time flies! What have I been up to? 3 weekends ago I went to babysit gorgeous Lola for the first time, as Hayde and Mick had a party to go to. It was a bit nervewracking and I kept checking every half an hour that she was ok lol! She woke up once and cried for about 20 mins but I managed to get her back to sleep. I got home at 3am lol! But at that time its an easy drive home and it only took me 20 mins, as opposed to nearly an hour with the traffic (its only 12 miles away but its a bugger of a route).

I uploaded some photos to Photobucket and wow, Photobucket has some great cool things now!! Check out this photo of Lola - I went to the Photobucket Edit and gives tons of goodies :


And for one of our challenges, I did this layout (havent edited in Photobucket)


Talking of Lola, I have completed 4 pages of 2008 Calendar which I am doing for my sister Hayde! Here is a slide show of them - as usual bright and colourful!

OK next on the list was the wedding last weekend at a beautiful palace (no Liv, not my palace!!) in Woodstock - Blenheim Palace! Shame the weather wasn't that good to take a good walk round, and also we couldn't go see the main tourist bits of the Palace - but I did manage a few photos!

Not sure why one of the photos didn't show up in the video, so adding it here :

ACK (a la Liv!!) now I see the photo in the slide show! oh well, you got to put it with it twice!

Ahhh, also, I had a go at creating a template, and did a layout with it :


So there you have it! Of my huge list of things to do I have only completed one - updating my blog! I need to to visiting the blogs of all my lovely mates and leave some love, haven't done the Home challenge nor started the new one!! Weather is crap today so maybe might be able to tick some more things off my list!!

Feast or Famine

Yep, that's me - I either don't blog or scrap for ages, then do loads in one go! Weather is really sunny here but blooming cold, so decided to catch up on doing layouts and blogging! I promised my sister that I would do a calendar with photos of Lola so I finally finished February! If things go well I might even get March done today (yeah, that's pushing it!!). Also wanted to try out slide.com so I went and found a few of my layouts and converted them using slide! See what you think!

I scrapped I blogged!

Where does time fly!! Never enough hours in the day to do everything! But, I scrapped thanks to Lisa's great weekly challenges and Kimi's lovely Orton Effects for Photos and Liv's fantastic multi-photo template!

So first layout completed (boy it felt good) was one of my beautiful gorgeous and precious little niece Lola (and me!) combining Lisa's first challenge plus I used the Orton Effect on all the photos! Oh yeah, you can click on the photos to display them larger if you want!

Next up was another challenge about our Town! So I did photos of Richmond which is close enough to me, 1.25 miles away!! Need to do a second layout of my Town, this time of photos of Lima!

And finally completed today was last Sunday's quote challenge! I had downloaded the quote a few days ago and lost it! Took me ages to find it again today! Liv created a wonderful multi-photo template which I used. So photos of my lovely girlies Honey and Lucy. Not forgetting the beautiful little Simba who as you remember, is the rescued little blind cat that I sponsor. I also sneaked in a photo of the hunky Custard (was Mark's cat and now lives with Mark's parents) who used to stay at mine a lot! Love the photo I took of him with a mouse on his head, he didn't even budge!

Talking about cats, here is an update of Dexter aka Gingerblokeycat - this is the write up at the Cat Rescue place

I'm sure Liv will have a few comments to say about the wording "His Highness" lol!! Anyhow, I do hope he gets found a nice new home soon!

Right, I am out tonight with my best friend and we are going for a few bevvies to Windsor (popping in to my castle naturally - hehehehe!!!).

Simba

I got an email today with the details of Simba, the little cat I am sponsoring! As soon as I got the email of course I burst out crying, but when I read it again, I was happy to know that I am helping this little cat, who has now settled in his foster home and being so well looked after! So the money I send once a month will help towards him. Anyhow, here is what the Cat society told me about Simba :

"Here is some info and photos of Simba, I hope you don't find them too upsetting, they certainly upset me, so be prepared before you look at them, unfortunately this is the reality of people's neglect.

Simba is one of the lucky ones, he's no longer in pain and has quality of life now.

No detailed story as such, but this is what we know.

He was abandoned at a vets in very poor condition with total blindness in one eye and rapidly diminishing sight in the other. After a period of treatment (at the vets) his discomfort escalated and glaucoma was diagnosed after he came into HAWS care. One eye was removed by our vets immediately to ease his pain. The second eye has just been removed for the same reason and he is now beginning his recovery. Despite what he's been through he's a happy, purry cat, and very settled in his foster home. His foster mum sometimes forgets he is blind as he gets around so well.

Thank you so much for sponsoring him."

Hope you like his photos! I think he is absolutely gorgeous!