Poor neglected blog!

So... I'm going to attempt at least one posting a week for a while - see if I can rekindle the blogging habit / rabbit / hobbit (choices from my spell checker - you decide).

I'm not sure how long it is since I've blogged - the internet is currently down (thanks to an "upgrade" that Jim installed a couple of days ago.... it requires him to have woken up before I can actually post this). Certainly not since (or not much) since I started to play FarmVille on facebook - I couldn't see the point of facebook a year ago and now I'm spending far too much time on it playing this sim-type farming game - and if you are not playing FarmVille you won't want to add me on facebook... I'll try not to mention it again in this post...

Summer here was not very summery... lots of rain and only a few days of heat. I don't like the heat but I'm not that keen on rain either! We mostly spent summer in Bristol and enjoyed it despite the weather. The main casualty of the weather was my photography - hardly anything to show for it.

We went to Westonbirt Arboretum's Festival of Wood in August.

Jim's mother and her friend Ted were on a coach tour that meant they were in Cheltenham for the day. We popped up there and took them for an airing on Cleeve Hill. They were glad to get away from yet another day of potential shopping!

Autumn has been much better for weather, except the week we took on holiday - we seemed to pick the wettest week for that! But again it was fun and as we were on holiday I took photos anyway.

For my birthday (though not actually on it) we went to see the Autumn colour at Wesonbirt.

Our week up in the Yorkshire Dales was a prelude to a surprise 70th birthday party for one of Jim's aunts. She was indeed very surprised but also delighted that so many people turned up for her. We then spent a couple of days with Jim's mother before making our way back home... and to more FarmVille! (??? words before I gave way... ;-)

Whilst in the Dales we visited some caves - ones with a guided tour, there was a lot of stooping but no crawling through water ;-) - there were lots of fantastic stalagmites / stalemates (my spell checker again!) amd stalagtites (no guesses for that one...) - hard to photograph but wonderful to see. The guide even extinguished the lights briefly for us all to see the caves by candlelight as the Victorians would have seen them when exploring them. And then he blew out the candle so we had utter darkness too.

Jim had discovered the existence of a small turf labyrinth only 20 minutes from his mother's house - despite the nearness it wasn't a place she or he had been before - so we explored it whilst visiting her.

One of the advantages of taking a dog on a long journey is its an excuse to look for interesting places to stop where one can let her out to have a bit of a run. We'd stopped at this place before but not discovered the topiary before!

See all the photos from the mosaic in this flickr slideshow: