Summer Livin…..

And sorry if you’ve now got that annoyingly singable tune from Grease floating around in your head!

I just had to tell you about our beautiful weekend here in Michigan Reading through some of your blogs towards the end of the week I noticed a common theme….. rain! Seems like the good old English summer has done it again, not appearing that is, even a lady I know who lives in Toronto was lamenting the fact that out of the last 71 days it’s rained there for 41 of them. And I’m sure our Australian friends would like a bit of warm sunshine soon. I know we had a lot of rain here in June, I remember posting about it, but since then it’s pretty much dried up. It hasn’t rained here for three weeks, and the long range forecast (for the next 10 days) is for more sun and no rain. Not that that I’m complaining mind you! It’s just a bit “feast or famine” that’s all, a bit of rain here and there would be nice too, especially for the garden, all the hand watering is becoming time consuming, and we don’t want to run the sprinklers every day, not only is it wasteful of a precious resource we’d also get quite a shock when the bill arrives!

But having the sun is wonderful. I freely admit that we’ve both become sun worshipers since moving here. One of the best things is that you rarely have to plan which weekend you’re going to do something or go somewhere based upon the weather, as most weekends are lovely to be honest. So what did we do?

Well, we started off Saturday morning with a leisurely breakfast on the deck…. homemade blueberry pancakes with organic maple syrup and fresh coffee. It made getting on and actually doing something difficult I can tell you!

So I took the easy option at first and wandered round the garden taking a few photos of what’s currently in flower:

Rudbeckia Herbstonne “Autumn Sun” - isn’t it cheery? It will be a big boy eventually at 4-5ft, but I like bold splashes of colour, and as you can probably guess from it’s name, it will go on flowering right into Autumn. I also planted it in front of a blue spruce to make it “pop” even more!

Next up is a really interesting little flower… Ratibida, or Mexican Hat Flower! You can see why it gets it’s common name. I really like plants that are striking visually, there’s a lot in my garden that makes people go ” What is that??” This is also teamed with blue, a small shrub called a Caryopteris, a very pretty little shrub, available in a lovely spectrum of different shades of blue to dark purple. The bees and other insects absolutely adore it and it flowers well into September.

[Cayopteris flowers]

I do love Mallows too, such a stunning range of colours available, they’re really a hardy type of Hibiscus, although over here, they’re always known as the Mallow. I only have two, I’d like more but they can become quite sizable shrubs and I don’t have room.

Another flower I’ve loved since I was little is the Balloon Flower or Platycodon. It’s not the flower that fascinates me, although that’s pretty enough in shades of blue, pink and white, it’s the way the flowers form and how they derive their common name. Take a look at this… do you see that veiny, engorged balloon like thing under the open flowers? That’s how the little buds form, if you squeeze it gently you can even feel the pressure! They grow larger than this and then eventually pop open to reveal these beautiful blue flowers. I can quite clearly remember going round my Grandma’s garden and “popping” the balloon flowers open whenever I got the chance!!

After all this photo taking I knew what my tasks were, deadhead, cut back the earlier flowering shrubs and perennials to allow more light to reach those currently in flower, spoon on some rotted compost to enrich the soil and to stop it drying out so quickly and to water some specific plants that needed it. I also potted up a rather sad looking perennial, my fault completely as I should have got it in the ground sooner. The gardening pretty much took up the rest of the day, until it was time for an afternoon cuppa. After that, I joined my hubby on the deck for a half hour relaxing sunbathe. We ate a simple dinner out on the deck and sat and chatted until long after dark, watching the wonderful fireflies light up the night.

Sunday we were up early and took our bikes to the park for a ride around the 8.5 mile paved trail, after which we washed up in the loos, changed our clothes and headed to “Moe’s On Ten Mile”, a very good local restaurant that has a superb breakfast buffet! Excellent quality too, and the price of $9.95 (about 5 pounds) includes the cook to order omelette and waffle station!

Later I went back out for a browse around the craft stores, one had 40% off EVERY item in it’s scrapbooking/card making aisles. Didn’t want to miss that! This is my haul, the bargain of the day was the set of 600 Making Memories eyelets in different colours on clearance for $6.97….. it went through the tills at $1.97!! I couldn’t believe it, a quid for the set!

And yes Maddy, you do see two little Fiskars tools in the front!! A craft knife (scalpel to you and me!) and a neat little thing for quickly embossing card stock from embossing plates. The orangey things in the top middle are silk maple leaves. The little purple box is a set of alphabet stamps for $1, and the four spools of self adhesive ribbon (top right) were only 50cents each! Considering the amount that was on sale I think I was very restrained and focused!!

Anyway, here I sit, early Sunday evening and it’s still 84F outside. I’ve been working on a little project I’ll show you in a few days as I don’t want to be out any more today. A is still outside in the sun, having worked in the garage all afternoon. A little salad for supper I think tonight and some fresh fruit too, nice and cooling and refreshing.

I hope whatever you’ve been getting up to you all enjoyed it and had a great weekend.

Another Birthday, Another Card

Today is my brothers birthday, he’ll be 47 years young. Like all brothers he can be a trial at times! I still remember, quite vividly, the night my parents went out and we all played Hide and Seek in the house. My brother put me in a great hiding place……. inside the warm airing cupboard on top of all the spare sheets and blankets….. and forget to let me out again! It was so warm and cosy in there that I fell asleep. When my folks returned they turned the house upside down looking for me!! I was 4 at the time!

From an early age my brother had a passion for machinery, old cars, old bikes etc. He’s owned a number of “classic” cars and motorbikes over the year, his current collection consists of three bikes; a road/touring bike that gets a lot of use through Europe, a lovely old BSA that he takes to classic bike events (including towing it all the way to Germany once!) and a rare, old trials bike that he’s busy restoring.

We get together whenever we can, we share very similar tastes him and me…. we both love hiking and hill walking, we love going to car/bikes/air shows, we like a good night out with friends at a nice pub, we like going to race tracks, visiting car museums, hanging out in cafes, traveling…. the list goes on. He’s a very happy kind of person and likes to enjoy his life with his partner and their friends, it’s hard to get him on the phone at times as he’s always out doing something!

For his card I came across a superb photo site on the web that specialises in really arty shots of old cars, a lot of the photos are of the hood ornaments, or a close up three quarter view, you rarely see the whole car. It was the quality of the photos that drew me in, and as soon as I saw the lovely old Bugatti Type 38, I knew I had to use it. The card is 5″x7″ and first I printed the photo at a 25% transparency, slightly smaller than the card and mounted it in the center. I then printed a much smaller version of the pic in full colour and mounted it to a strip of blue card. I’d already ran the strip though the printer for the Happy Birthday sentiment, and to finish it off, I added three silver brads and then mounted the strip on foam pads. It’s much harder making a card for a man so I’m happy how it turned out. Hopefully he’ll appreciate it!

Open Wide

Pleath excuth my typing thith morning….. I was at the dentitht last night. Don’t you just love the happy drugs? I love happy drugs. I love the way they finally wear off at about 2am and leave you with a pounding head and the feeling that you’ve been beaten about the head with a baseball bat! Lol.

I have three old mercury fillings that are breaking down and that’s a really bad thing. Mercury is a heavy metal, mercury is toxic, and old bad fillings that aren’t taken care of bleed mercury into your mouth, which you then swallow. Eventually these little toxic deposits of dental love lodge themselves in your brain, they can cause a build up of heavy metals, and these heavy metals have been linked with Alzheimers in later life. What I can’t believe, knowing how bad this stuff is for you, is how many dentists still use heavy metals for fillings!! Isn’t it crazy?? We had to search for a while for a dentist who doesn’t use mercury any more, and fully understands the necessity of using a dental dam to block up your mouth as he’s working, so the little bits of filling being removed don’t end up floating around in your bloodstream. It would rather defeat the purpose of removing the filling in the first place! I have one more to go, and while I’m on a roll I’m getting them all taken care of at once, so Monday (11 Aug) I’ll be back in the dreaded chair having the final one removed.

Before that though, the weekend is stretching ahead of us, and we already have our days planned out. Saturday we’ll be at Thunder Over Michigan, the annual airshow at Willow Run Airport (home of The Yankee Air Museum) that we like to attend every year. Sunday will be a more relaxing day, we plan to kayak in the morning at the park and then just chill out in the afternoon, take it as it comes.

Whatever your plans are I hope you have a lovely and relaxing weekend. And please spare a thought for my pal Claire, she’s moving into her new pad this weekend with her family. Moving is stressful at the best of times, fingers crossed it will go smoothly for them.

Hula, Hula Baby!

This last weekend was the 50th Anniversary of Waterford Hills Road Racing, and my God, what a weekend we had ourselves!! Talk about fun in the sun. I took part of Thursday and all day Friday off work and we pitched our little tent in the tracks campground in order to be part of it and to not miss a single second of the event.

The theme of the celebration was mostly vintage racing, the kind of stuff that would have been on track starting from the late 50’s, all the way up through the 70’s and 80’s, our final run group of the day was modern race cars, Corvettes, Neons, Mazda RX7’s and Miata’s (MX5), basically a very eclectic bunch of our regular race car drivers, representing Waterford Hills as it is today. The competitors came from far and wide, some as far away as Colorado, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, Illinois and Kansas. Some of the drivers and their families had a two day tow to reach us! That’s what I call dedication.

A and I volunteered in whatever capacity was needed as soon as we arrived on Thursday, I manned the gate from 4pm until 8pm, directing all the drivers up into the paddock and advising them on the best spots to park their huge tow rigs and trailers. Our paddock has capacity for about 100 race vehicles and one support vehicle per race car, be it either a truck or a trailer but not both…… we had 126 race cars squeezed in there, packed in like sardines they were!! I have absolutely no idea where we put them all! A was one of about four people in the paddock helping them all get parked and situated. Friday and Saturday I worked False Grid and A was a Flagger at a corner station, communicating to the on-track drivers through the use of the flags, and helping them when they spun off, got into difficulty or had some kind of mechanical trouble.

Friday night was also the Concours in the Park at nearby Depot Park in Clarkston, an event Waterford Hills stages annually with all benefits going to Clarkston Scamp. Scamp is a summer camp for mentally challenged children from the area and it’s a charity we’ve supported for many, many years. A and I took along our little Ginetta G15, her first outing since the engine mishap we had back in May, and we were chuffed to bits to be presented with one of the Judges Awards due to the rarity of our car.

Saturday was Hawaiian Day for all of the volunteers, you could decorate your shelter and dress up your crew in Hawaiian shirts etc…. Grid went a little to town, bunch of exhibitionists that we are!! Grass skirts and stuff won’t work for us, they’d be a serious fire hazard around the race cars, so we opted instead for shell and flower bras, leis and hibiscus flowers in our hair!! If only I had a dollar for every time I was asked if I would like a lei!!! Our little outfits received a lot of attention, the drivers certainly appreciated it!! At the end of the day I ended up giving my flower bra to an older chap from England who was visiting English friends who lived near Toronto, and who was racing a beautiful Merlyn Formula Ford (the Toronto/English that is). Apparently it’s packed in his luggage now and will be making the trip back to Lancashire with him in a couple of weeks, I didn’t dare ask what he was going to do with it!!

Saturday evening we had a HUGE banquet come barbeque, really good food and a fantastic night of camaraderie. On Sunday A and I both got to spectate and watch some really brilliant racing. It was great to see how many British cars were out there, they must have made up about 70% of the race cars, I felt like I was on some kind of weird parallel plane, especially when I was working on the Grid on Friday and Saturday.

And all of this was put on by just two people, with a small team of volunteers, including us, helping out where ever we could. What a staggering achievement, and it really epitomizes exactly what our track is all about. Thank you Doug and Laura, we love you guys.

Happy Birthday Sophie

This little muppet on the left celebrated her 5th birthday yesterday, these lovely girls are the daughters of A’s brother and his wife, and they’re all lucky enough to live in the lovely old market town of Kendal, in Cumbria. They can see the start of the Lakeland hills from the upstairs front bedrooms of their house, it’s a beautiful view.

But back to Sophie! Pictured with her is her older sister Emma, who is six, but they’re polar opposites in looks, personality and tastes. Emma is into everything pink and princessy, all of her clothes are pink and she’s very picky about what she wears, I think the only thing not pink in her entire wardrobe is her school uniform. She also hates trousers. Sophie on the other hand is a little tomboy if I ever saw one. Her most favourite things in life are all things Thomas The Tank Engine….. “what did you get for Christmas Sophie?” “A big Thomas the Tank model that makes noises and has little puffs of steam coming out of the funnel!” “What do you want for your birthday Sophie?” “Some new Thomas books and a Thomas dvd!” You get the idea!!

So I made her this card of a decoupaged Thomas and friends. I’d hoped to find a side view of Thomas, as my original plan was to have little puffy clouds coming out of the funnel saying “Happy Birthday Sophie”, but I trawled the internet in vain. However I really liked the picture that I did find, so it didn’t turn out too badly in the end.

Just Look At Us Now!

Remember these? The tubs I planted up at the end of May?

Here they are again, just two months later….

Would you believe there’s two half whiskey barrels hidden somewhere under those flowers!!

The Laughter of Small Children

is such a soothing balm for the hideousness of the last six or so weeks, the result of which had left me in quite a moribund state.

The tally from mid June has been one sister in and out of hospital, thankfully out completely now; one of our wonderful racing drivers killed in a freak accident at a track in Canada; another of our wonderful racing drivers left with numerous broken ribs, a crushed sternum, a leg broken in two places and a completely written off race car, this incident happened at our own track on our last scheduled race weekend. Thankfully it didn’t rob him of his sense of humour! After that we lost our good friend to organ failure at the tender age of 39; some friends of ours lost one of their friends in a horse riding accident at the age of 41; and I recently learned of an acquaintance who has lost her husband of 1 year at the age of 26. I haven’t known what to do with myself, how to cope with such sadness and how to wake up every morning and just muster the strength to get out of bed and face another day.

The events of the last six weeks have made me put my life completely in perspective… to not take things for granted, to be grateful for the small occurances each day, to keep a smile on my face and say hello to perfect strangers, to avoid conflict as much as possible and to learn to be more forgiving. The biggest thing though has been a very stark realisation that this is my life, it’s happening now, and to stop thinking and planning so much for the future, because quite frankly, while I’m focusing on the future, I’m missing out on the present. And the reason they call it the present is because life is a gift and we need to take the time to enjoy it.

Like spending time with those giggling, mischievous, fun loving children….. On the 18th of this month, A and I joined some friends and their children at our local Metropark (Kensington) for a night of “Harmony in the Metropark”, a series of free outdoor concerts with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, so along with about 2000 other people, we spread our blankets on the ground, set out our picnic and had ourselves a fantastic, if sticky and humid, evening! Good food, good wine, great company, giggling, dancing children, and fantastic classical music. But not the bland, 30 minute when is this torture going to end kind of classical music, but more the oh I love this toe tapping, feel good, clap along piece! And the DSO with their wonderful, fun loving, spontaneous and warm hearted conductor, Thomas Wilkins, were in top form. Well, what else would you expect from a world class symphony orchestra? Add to the fact that the concert series is FREE, and you can understand why upwards of 2000 people turn up year after year.

But back to those kids… we had dancing kids, we had marching kids, we had giggling kids, we had laugh until you almost wet yourself kids, oh wait no! That was the adults!! It was a great night, and I needed that night so badly. I never realised how badly.

A Hard Month So Far

A and I lost a really good friend on July 2nd, he was just 39.  When we came to America in 1994 him and his then girlfriend were among the first friends we made in this country, A used to work with him.  We went to their wedding, saw them buy their first house together and start their family, two wonderful little boys now aged 9 and 6.  We never expected in a million years that 14 years later we’d be attending his funeral, consoling his widow and hugging his little boys.

Please forgive the lack of posts right now, I really don’t have the heart for it at the moment.

Travels In A Small Country Pt 2

Part One of this little mini travelogue can be found here.

Not long after A and I came to America in 1994, my mum and step father, who were both retired, moved to Yeovil in Somerset. They moved to be closer to my brother and his family. So on every visit back to the UK, we now spend time with them there instead of Milton Keynes, which is where they used to live, and I must say, it’s a heck of a lot more pleasant!! Where they live is very close to the county border with Dorset, so we toddle off to the coastline, or around the lanes to beautiful villages, gardens and walks. It doesn’t matter if we spend our time in Dorset or Somerset, as they’re both equally beautiful and restful places, in fact, I think most of the photos here are actually from Dorset this time round, but I’ve added some extra ones at the bottom from previous visits to Somerset.

What struck us immediately after a few visits was just how much there is to do in the area…. and I don’t mean big touristy attractions. I’m talking about nights out to pubs where there is a guest artist singing, traditional “pub bowls” or skittles, with old wooden alleys, village fetes, fairs and markets, various club meets that my brother is involved with that we get invited along to, loads of stunning gardens and old houses to visit, pretty villages and traditional tearooms and miles and miles of absolutely stunning walks.

I could live in this area. Happily.

These few photos are from a walk A and I did with my brother, starting and finishing at Cerne Abbas, Dorest. Actually, to be more truthful, we finished at Abbots Tearooms in Cerne Abbas!! Cerne Abbas is also rather famous for its, er Giant Man, shall we say!

Another fantastic place to visit in Dorset is the lovely town of Lyme Regis, a beautiful, small fishing and boating port with tremendous charm and character. The French Lieutenants Woman with Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons was filmed here.

A little further down the way is Westbay, the tiny little village with the big cliff!! That’s how I always remember it anyway!. We had bought freshly baked, stunning, home made pasties in Lyne Regis, and because we weren’t hungry at that point (something to do with another tearoom if I remember correctly!), we wandered along to Westbay and had a walk before devouring eating our pasties on the sea front.

Finally! A couple of photos from Somerset! Tintinhull House, in the delightfully named village of Tintinhull. I love the mellow Somerset Ham stone used to build the hall, the gardens are just sublime, being almost entirely contained by a lovely wall of the same mellow stone. Sadly it was a dire day, and early in the season too, so not much was in flower.

More photos are available on the web, here.

After visiting Tintinhull, it was on to perhaps the most famous street in England…. Gold Hill in Shaftesbury. To the English, this rather “hilly” street needs no introductions. It’s a typical “chocolate box” English scene, but most of us identify it with the “Hovis” bread advert on TV when we were kids! I’d never been before, so I was happy to go along.

More stunning photos from around this area, both Dorset and Somerset, can be found here. I love this site, talk about kicking it up a notch or two.

I also decided against the gratuitous shots of Somerset just for the sake of it! This post is photo heavy as it is, but a lot will be revealed with a simple web search.

The Ballerinas of the Garden

Paeonies, one of my absolute favourite flowers, with their beautiful colour combinations and delicate scent. The only bad thing about them is that they have a habit of flowering gloriously and profusely about two days before the major storms are due! Sadly, they go from fully laden, heady blossoms, to a disheveled mess of brown stained petals strewn all over the garden path. I often think they look like confetti in the rain.

There are three in my front, South facing garden and these are the ones that end up getting beaten to a pulp in a matter of days after they’ve started to flower. Happens every year, happened this year. The sun warmed brickwork behind them coaxes them into flower just a little earlier than the ones in the back garden. For that, they pay a price. I usually manage a couple of photos of them, and then suddenly they’re gone, and I’m left wielding a pair of secateurs, cutting down the flowering stems until next year.

In the back garden though, they flower just a week or two later, just enough for the worst of the storms to have passed on by. These are my bargain paeonies, bought at the very end of the season one year as unnamed little pip squeaks that were a couple of days short of being tossed onto the compost heap at a local supermarket. I think they cost me about $5 at the time for four of them. I planted them up and waited with anticipation the next Spring to see what I would get. Their flower buds are the most divine shade of pink, splashed with a little dark pink and red…. and then they open to the most beautiful soft, pastel pink with a light scent and the occasional red/dark pink marking. I think they’re Raspberry Ripple, but I’m not sure. Currently there’s two large vases of them in the house, and still plenty of flowers to enjoy in the garden. They’ve become very prolific and haven extended my season of paeony enjoyment by at least a month. Not a bad return for $5!

When I was small my Grandma had an old fashioned powder puff in a really pale shade of pastel pink…. at the time I thought it was a large paeony flower!! I think I was about 5 or so!! I think I must give her some credit for my paeony love.