Photo Phrenzy

A new job, coldwetwindy weather, the beginnings of a chest cold (or at the very least, an icky cough) a date night and the house to ourselves this weekend. That was our week.
Have some photos.

Great weekends make the world go round

Another quiet week, but followed this time by a great weekend! Friday night we met with some friends, Paul and Danielle, and had dinner at their house followed by games and soaked with wine. So much wine.
It was a great night, and even though when I entered their home, I'd only met them once at the wedding, I left feeling like I'd known them for a very long time. And that's a very good feeling.
It made me feel like definitely, soon, this place will be home. Plans were made and we got into a cab feeling jolly, and in my case, rather wobbly.

We tumbled in the door (well I did, Mick was sober) at 3am and collapsed into bed while I rambled on about God knows what and finally fell into a spiny sleep.

Yesterday I woke up with quite the hangover, but after some water and toast, I started to become myself again. Mick and I had a quiet day of watching films and Friends while house sitting for his dad, and my sister in law stopped by in the afternoon for a visit. Today is another quiet, lazy day. We all need those :)

Have some photos. And a lovely Sunday!

News!

Good news! My visa arrived this morning, so now I can go job hunting! Not sure what I'll find but hopefully something good will come along in this yucky economy! Cross your fingers and say some prayers that I find something quickly!
I promise to write a good lengthy post soon!
Here are a few photos from the weekend :) happy Monday!
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Okay, been a few hours and I've found more info out. In looking at job applications today I realised that I need a national insurance number. I think this is like a social security number? Just because I've been granted a visa doesn't mean I'm automatically given a national insurance number. Sooo I called the border agency and they told me who to get in contact with. Apparently I have to go to an interview to get this number? So I have an appointment next week to go do this. I'm hoping it's just a formality to show them my papers and Residency Permit to prove that I moved here legally. I'm not too worried, it's just another of the many steps I've had to take to live here. I just wish I had known about it earlier I guess??? Oh well, we shall see!

Halloween Party!

Yesterday afternoon Mick and I hopped on the train to a little village called Aylesham. It's an eerily quiet little place with not much to do, as was made evident by the three young boys walking around with planks of wood, angrily slapping the grass. Hmm!
The reason for our trip was to spend the night at our friends' house. Rachael and Josh have a cute little house that was decorated very carefully for a good night. Even the giraffe statues by the fireplace had costumes, and the Audrey Hepburn portrait had vampire fangs. So with a great atmosphere and even better company, we consumed beer and sangria and had a cheerful night.
In case you're wondering what Mr. White and I went as, well, we played it safe and stuck to an American classic- cow folk.
It's looking beautifully autumny in Kent. As we left Mick's dad's house yesterday I couldn't help but be mesmerised by the dance of leaves falling from branches in a spray of feathery flames. It's beautiful, and the air has that thick, earthy and smoky scent that I've always associated with this time of year. To me, autumn is one last brilliant show of what mother nature is capable of before the cold and stillness of winter. One last display of gorgeous color and the power of secrets we humans can only begin to understand.
I am infatuated with it.

A very yellow tree in King's Hill

Yee-haw :)

Weekend recap

Packing, moving, a date with the husband for no real reason and a quiet night to myself with Sex and the City 2. Just a bit of what we've been up to around here. And some photos.

It's weird how different a house looks when it's nearly empty. And so echo-y, too!

A night on my own- my husband and his step-dad made another trip back to Bognor for one last load of things on Saturday. Mick and I are house/business/cat sitting for his dad this week, so I had the house to myself and enjoyed a bubble bath of mammoth proportions.

Dinner at a historic inn down the road in this darling little village. Good food, good wine, good times <3

Fresh autumn apples from my father-in-law's garden. I'm thinking some baked cinnamon apples are in order with dinner tonight :)

Instagr.am

Some of my friends have been doing this instagr.am thing and I always thought it looked fun and cool. Since I just got the new iPhone (omg I love it!) I thought I'd download the app and try it out. Here are a few from last night and today.


Have a great Saturday, peeps!

Doing what I do, son!

Doesn't he just look like a rock star her? Love this.

Sasha's gorilla face!

Harley! He's getting so big and so flippin cute. He looks like a stuffed animal.

Daily Shoot- Equinox? (not really)

I'm a little bit confused by today's Daily Shoot assignment.

October 2, 2011 (Day 686) Assignment:
It's the solstice. Make a photo that captures the day for you wherever you are.

I'm confused by this because I'm about 99% sure that the autumnal equinox was last week? It's always September 23rd, isn't it? And I'm not even sure that there is a solstice this time of year?
Anyway, the last thing it feels like around here is autumn. About 80F again today. As we walked along the beach, I couldn't believe the amount of people that were there day camping, BBQing, paddling around in inflatable boats, and watching their children splash around in the shallows. The water was really calm, with only a few tiny waves. It was so quiet and still, apart from all the people. It feels like July out there.
However, it is in fact autumn and one of my very favorite holidays is only 29 days away. Halloween! While Mick was mowing the lawn today, I wandered around the garden snapping photos for the assignment. I love how creepy this brick wall looks with the vines that seem to have died while creeping up the bricks. Feels very Halloween-y doesn't it?

Mick and I filled out the forms for my visa application today. We're basically done, we just have to call the border agency tomorrow and clear up a few questions then we can send it off, wait to hear about when my biometrics appointment will be, and then we're done with this step and I can work soon (hopefully)!

What have you done with your Sunday?

Daily Shoot- Communication (and weekend stuff)

Happy Saturday, guys! Hope you all have lovely weekend plans. I've got the house to myself for a bit this afternoon and I had glorious plans of hanging clean laundry out on the line and absorbing some beautiful sunshine. And then the spiders spoiled my plans. They are EVERYWHERE! Their webs are all along the back of the house and in the bushes and hedges out front. And there are loads of little webs all over the line outside, and I'm not about to clean it off, so the laundry went into the dryer.
Instead of soaking up sunshine, I decided to do today's Daily Shoot assignment.

October 1, 2011 (Day 685) Assignment:
Make a photograph that illustrates an aspect of communication.

Here's my homework...

I had a bit of fun editing this one with some basic software. If you love me you can buy me Photoshop :D I played with the saturation and contrast a bit and gave the photo a cool feel. Anyways, I figured everybody who posted for this assignment would be uploading photos of cell phones, Skype, and laptops and emails. I wanted to take it back a notch and focus on the original form of communication over the miles. No, not smoke signals, I don't have that kind of stuff lying around the house! But what I do have is a lot of handwritten correspondence. August and September were pretty busy months for cards- my birthday, the wedding, and Mick's birthday. The house is full of colorful envelopes with interesting stamps with Queen Elizabeth, Ronald Reagan, Liberty Bell, as well as some sort of bird?
Remember life before email and text messaging? It was always so much fun to find a brightly colored envelope with your name on it in the mailbox! Whether it was a card, a letter, or a gift, it was always so exciting, wasn't it?

In other news, today is supposed to be the warmest day in October in England, like, ever.

 Mick and I have the house to ourselves tonight. We're doing a pizza and movie night with lots of cuddles. Tomorrow we're going to get my visa paperwork started.

What are your plans for the weekend?

Just to catch you up...

Hey, everybody! Hope you all had a great weekend.

Just a quick rundown of what's been going on with the soon-to-be Mr. and Mrs. White. Friday we went into Chichester. It's the nearest big town, technically it's a city because there's a cathedral there, which is apparently the criteria for a city in England. It's got some really cool old buildings, the cathedral, and the Cross, which is in the center of the 4 main streets. Looksie.

Haaanyway. We took the bus in where we sat behind a man who seemed to be conjuring spiders because there were at least three crawling all over him. Mick and I are both hardcore arachnophobics (he's worse than me, to be honest) so we kept a very close eye on the man and his little leggy friends. We visited a few shops in town, including the bridal store where I got my dress. I picked out some shoes to wear with my dress while Mick waited "patiently" for 40 minutes. We then met his mum for lunch. She headed back to work and we walked down to the cinema to see Harry Potter. I'd been waiting for weeks and was so excited to see it. However, when we got to the box office and told the girl the time we wanted to see it, she seemed confused. Apparently the showtimes Mick saw when he checked the day before weren't for Friday. We couldn't get the next show either because Mick's mum would be off work before then and we had to go to Kent that night. I'm not too ashamed to admit that I threw a contained, vertical tantrum that all 2 year olds should aspire to. Instead, we went to the pool hall and played a few games. I actually beat him once. Then we just wandered around for a bit and Mick bought me a new pair of awesome headphones. Then we hit the road for Kent.

Saturday, we walked down the the pub and had a fry up together. Then we went to Bluewater (see this entry if you don't remember Bluewater) and registered for wedding gifts at John Lewis, which is a nice department store. At first Mick wasn't really into the process, but eventually he was taking the scanner away from me to register for things. We signed up for some really nice stuff, but I'm most excited for the Vera Wang China.

image from artedona.com

After we got back to the house, some of Mick's mum's friends came over for dinner. I had too much wine and a nice headache to accompany the wobbles when I got into bed.

Sunday we went out to lunch with Mick's grandad. His birthday was last weekend and we weren't in Kent so we had a belated celebration at the Chef & Brewer Pub in Wateringbury. It's pretty old looking and has all kinds of wooden beams inside.

image from bmwccgbforum.co.uk

 

 

Then, we headed back to Bluewater to see Harry Potter finally! And on July 31st, which my nerdular inclined friends will know, is Harry's birthday. England is weird, though, in that they actually have assigned seating at some of the cinemas. For a movie. So even though we got there when there were still lots of empty seats... the only tickets available were for the third row on the far left side. Even though Mick wasn't thrilled (not that he was thrilled to see the movie in the first place...), he felt really bad and didn't want me to have to miss the movie twice, so we went for it. It wasn't all that bad, really. I guess I was pretty underwhelmed with the film. I mean, they did it well, but movies are never as good if you've already read the book, and I didn't want it all to end. After it let out, we were going up the escalator to exit the cinema. I was on the step below Mick and rested my face against his arm and he looked down to see me pouting.
"What?" He asked.
"It's over."

Then we got up at 5:30 this morning to come back to Bognor with Mick's mum before she had to go to work. And when we were getting out of bed there was a pigeon outside the bedroom window cooing. Except the way it cooed made it sound like it was saying "wooooooooohooooooooooo!" which made me laugh.

And now here's another week. And in 4 weeks my parents will be here! Yay!

Tomorrow we have to go to Crawley to do the banns of marriage, which I already told you about but in case you forgot...



Have a good Monday!