An even cuter picture of me...

I look like a boy, but my hair is there - honest! It is tied back!

Tidying and reminiscing

I have sorted out my book shelves today and taken many books to the charity shop. They have been annoying me for a while, well since I returned from Lancaster actually, so about 18 months! I had too many books for my shelves since combining many belongings from 4 years cumulation in Lancaster to what I had left behind (a room full) in St Annes. Books were piled on top of books on the shelves, which looks scrufy I think. So now my shelves look ordered, hooray! In the process I also came across a handful of photographs which hadn't been filed so I have been scanning them into my computer.

This is a classic. From sports day when I was in year 7 at the High School, it was taken by a photographer from the local paper and I featured on the back page along with a report about the day. Good picture (apart from the tongue hanging out of my mouth - not good to be displayed for all to see when you are only 11) but I did attrociously at the long jump and came 9th out of 10 in my year!

Another professional job. This is my sister, cousin and I. I am wearing the dress I wore for my baptism, I loved it!

I am considering a hair chop as well. Looking back at pictures of me when my hair looked neat make me think of chin level hair again. I shall contemplate.

Cornered... no escape...

Tomorrow I am all set to meet the new Bishop of Lancaster. The vicar collared me ouside church this morning and suggested I go to the 'Welcome to Lancashire' service or 'Hello this is the Kirkham deanery' or whatever it is in Lund tomorrow evening. He said a lady from church was going and I could speak to her... I thought, mmm... then he turned away and she was there offering to pick me up at ten to seven! So no music group for me tomorrow night... and I have been instructed to make myself known. There is no escape!

Have a heavenly Christmas!

Please excuse a little pride on my behalf in this post today. Yesterday Sarah and I went to St Tees to create a giant Christmas card. The idea being that members of the congregation make a donation to Operation Christmas Child (the chosen charity) and then add to the giant card instead of sending many cards to lots of church members. The money spent goes to a good cause and there are far fewer cards being sent which pleases the environment.

The design

I borrowed inspiration for the design from the illustrations by Tim Jonke in Bob Hartman's book "A Night The Stars Danced For Joy" (which is also an amazing retelling of the Christmas story). The idea was for us to make a large angel, the angel Gabriel, to go in the centre of the display and then have many smaller angels for people to write their greetings on and then add to the display to create a 'heavenly host'.

The display board in the church is only quite small so we extended the display with the backing paper and then with the border. It took us an hour and a half just to put up the backing paper!! Having bought many different types of sparkly gold and silver paper and material we went to church yesterday to put it all together. We used an overhead of the initial angel design to project onto the board and then used that to draw around the various parts of the angel.
We then assembled all the parts of the angel on the floor so that we could work out where all of the different sections were going to fit together and in which order we would need to staple them to the board.Finally we attached the angel to the display. We added some schiffon type transparent gold material for the body tied together with ribbon to give it a 3D effect and added the greeting 'Have a heavenly Christmas' to complete the card. I think it is fabulous!!

CUs and SUs and all that

I enjoyed this cartoon today. I also enjoyed reading Yellow's Blog and his take on the matter.

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

Christmas shopping

Today was a day of much wandering around town. I'm not a big fan of shopping (understatement), but decided that as I am regularly unoccupied at present I might as well use my time productively and begin my Christmas shopping, normally a task reserved for the few days of panic before Christmas day. Buying earlier does have its drawbacks though - without the fear element I am more inclined to wander aimlessly without a notion of what to buy. I did make significant inroads however so came home satisfied.

I don't like the aspect of Christmas shopping whereby you have to buy something for everyone on your list... by that I mean that I don't always find something that I think someone will really love and so inevitably buy something, anything, just so that I have given them something on Christmas day. This kind of gift giving seems so wasteful. I am a big fan of alternative gifts from charities, such as a set of school books for a school child in Uganda etc. My sister bought me something similar for my birthday this year. Still, it's all very well to be bought these things, and I am sure there are people I could buy them for myself, but for most people on my gift list an alternative gift would be inappropriate. I think the whole point of giving is to find something that that person would appreciate, something personal. Buying an alternative gift for someone who would not appreciate it would be like buying a dvd that I wanted to watch and giving it to my dad... we have very different tastes in film!

Fantastic fairs...

Yes, it was the annual autumn/Christmas fair at church today, always a treat. A particular highlight this year was the tombola from which I won this amazing prize:

Half a set of plastic coasters! In fact, I know it was half a set because another lady won the other three coasters to complete the set! I do believe they truely surpassed themselves this year.