Chicago!! The Friday!

Where to start with such a fantastic weekend I had in Chicago with the most amazing group of girlies! This weekend had been planned for so long that we had been counting the days for like 6 months lol! Jana was our hostess for the weekend and organised everything - negotiated great room rates at the Hyatt Regency and made sure we were all ok. She was AWESOME!!

Soooo, I flew in to Chicago and got there around 11am on the Friday morning and went to look for Joan who had arrived 20 mins before me! Of course we spotted each other straight away and it was just so amazing to see her in real life! We hugged and kissed and chatted away whilst waiting for Susan who was next to arrive! Same with Susan - all 3 of us hugged and kissed! Amy was the next to arrive but she was getting into a different terminal so we got into a taxi to go pick her up! She was waiting for us and it was amazing to all be together. The taxi driver must have thought we were total loonies because we chatted the whole journey lol! Got to the hotel and checked in and went to find the others who had arrived Thursday night and earlier on Friday morning. Of course we spotted them - they were all huddled in a circle yakking and laughing! Never heard us as we kept shouting for them lol so we approached them and stood right behind and said "Helloooooooo"!!! OMG - the screams and laughing and talking and hugging and kissing!! They were Jana, Jessica, Liv, Deb, Laurie, Tori, Jeanne, Lisa (Latz) and Shell! It was like we had all known each other all our lives! What an amazing reunion!

All 14 of us decide to go walking to get something to eat. You can imagine 14 women cackling and laughing and loaded with fantastic cameras taking photos of everything and walking at snail pace! And not to mention making sure we didn't lose anyone! I wish we'd had a video camera to capture the atmosphere but as we didn't here are some photos! Remember to click on each photo to enlarge it!

Soo, walking, yakking, laughing, taking photos, stopping and taking more photos we ended up in a Mall! Some went shopping, others just window shopped! Then headed back to the hotel to get showered and changed ready to go out for dinner to a beautiful restaurant called Fultons on the River. But before then we all met up for a drink in one of the bars of the hotel, courtesy of the lovely Shell who got the round! Oh yeah, Lisa and her DH Todd arrived in the evening too!

Dinner was delicious and such a beautiful place - thank you so much Jana for organising it! We then headed back to the hotel and all got together to talk and some lovely speeches with a lot of tears (nice tears). Jessica gave us each a beautiful goodie bag, Liv also had some lovely pressies and I gave out some London and Windsor key rings, and Laurie gave us each a Green Chillie Stew pack!

OK, that's it for the first installment! Next post will be Chicago Saturday's events! Ohhh yeah, some of the photos are mine but I have borrowed photos from the others for this blog - hope its ok, if not shout!

Red Bull and my Birthday

Next on my catch up list were two events in June, the Redbull Flugtag in Hyde Park and then my birthday! The Red Bull Flugtag is "Flugtag (Flying Day), is an event organized by Red Bull that has taken place in over 70 cities around the world and the second Red Bull Flugtag London day is happening on Saturday 7th June 2008 in Hyde Park.
Flugtag involves competitors constructing man powered flying machines and launching them and their pilot or pilots off a 6m high ramp and into the water below, which in London’s case will be The Serpentine in Hyde Park."

So we applied for tickets and got 8 in the second ballot and my neighbour Mike gave me 2 more. What a fun day we had, we took a picnic and watched all these so called flying machines jump from the ramp and try to fly - more plopping than flying although one did fly for 39 metres!

Here are some of the "Flying Machines" (Click on images for larger view)


And gorgeous Lolita having a fantastic time!

So that was on the Saturday and on the Sunday we had an early celebration of my birthday with my family. My dad hosted the event and he and Kate did a wonderful lunch and I was totally spoilt! It was so lovely to have everyone together and have such a lovely time. My family were amazing, they gave me some money (including my sister Franca in California) towards my Nikon 18-200 lens, a gorgeous camera bag and tons other presents. Here are some photos of my lovely family :

And a layout I did for one of the challenges

The Tuesday before my lovely friend Di took me to the theatre in Richmond to see a musical show called Shout "this show takes its inspiration from the fabulous hazy days of the swinging 60’s, capturing the amazing fashions, sexual liberation and great fun of the times. this show takes its inspiration from the fabulous hazy days of the swinging 60’s, capturing the amazing fashions, sexual liberation and great fun of the times." Everyone was singing away - great show!

Two days before my birthday I went our for dinner in Richmond with Di, Valerie and Samia which was lovely, and on my birthday Mark took me out for a yummy curry and gave me some cash, which I have splashed out on a Wacom Tablet which is winging its way over to me!

OK so that takes care of June with one major event which happened on 27th of June which was our Spraguefest in Chicago - so that will be the next post!

Catch up!

So many things have happened since I last blogged that I think I am going to do short posts, otherwise it will take about 5 pages! So this one is to update my May Photo a Day photos!

I had never used textures on my photos before, so when I played around with them with an extremely boring photo, WOW!! I am so pleased with this one
Because this is what the original photo looked like :

What a difference! I used a couple of Textures from Ghostbones, played around with the blending modes and out came a work of Art! (click on images for larger view)

Another one I loved, but didn't use any textures, was this one :

I didn't quite get to take 31 days worth of photos - managed about 23 I think. But it was a great experience and was lovely to find new things to take photos of! So here they all are in the slide show.

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!!