Happy New Year!

Sorry my blog has been closed for so long. I really wasn't expecting to be so anti-social for all these months.

Review of 2007

• The early part was dominated for me by Soul Collage and builders.
  I thoroughly enjoyed the collaging of cards and going to Ireland for Imelda's Soul Collage workshop. I'd spent 3 months solidly making cards before I went. That seems to have exhausted the seam for me.
• The builders were in because we'd had a very minor leak in our dining room ceiling - they managed to take months to sort this out, needing two rooms completely clear and did a lot more work than I'd imagined was necessary.... I found their presence very difficult - they were all pleasant people it was just the fact that they were in my space and we had all our furniture crammed into the rooms that weren't being worked on - that's what was hard. As Jim works from home and I don't go out to work either there was no escape!
• Whilst I was in Ireland Jim was bagging the last but three of his Munros and then when we were in Scotland in May he collected those as well. The last one was celebrated with as many of his Munro bagging companions as could make it.
• The summer was one of the wettest I've experienced (good job we'd had those builders in to fix the earlier leak) and consequently much cooler than the super-hot summer of 2006. My sister lives in Cheltenham where there was flooding - she'd had a minor flood in 2006 so she'd nagged the council into clearing their street's drains after that - rather tellingly their street was okay when many surrounding ones were not. So their house was not flooded. (One of the most cost effective remedies would be to fund drain clearing properly, that and stop building on flood plains of course. Nothing can help you if you are in standing water but many places were only flooded because of the drains not coping.) They still had to cope with no running water for weeks as the whole area's water supply was hit.
• We took up archery and throughly enjoyed it, even though our club shares its field with chickens.
• In the autumn one of my brother's had a minor heartattack - he had keyhole surgery and is making a good recovery. He's only 47. This and the earlier death of one of my ex-work colleagues brings home one's own mortality and the need to make of life what one can whilst still alive.

Jim and I have always planned to live in Cornwall sometime. We got married there seven years ago as a way of marking this. We've decided that 2008 is the year to do this. Jim's given up his job and we have some things we want to do to this house before we sell it. We've been living here since '96 and although we have done quite a lot there are a few more things to do before we call it finished.

Then we'll cross our fingers that someone wants to buy it despite the gloom in the papers about the property market, after which we'll be able to move to Cornwall and start the next phase of our lives there.