Ravendale House

They say you should be careful what you wish for in life, and on the face of it that is very good advice. But what happens when you get exactly what you’ve always wanted and it turns out to be exactly what you hoped it would be?

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The Calder Valley in West Yorkshire, a place close to my heart, has been in the news over the last few days due to severe flooding. A beautiful area comprising, amongst others, the towns of Mytholmroyd and Hebden Bridge, it is where I spent many happy times back in the 1970’s.

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Isn’t it funny where your mind goes when you let it wander? This morning I was lying awake at 4.30am, listening to the birds and wishing on this occasion they wouldn’t sing quite so enthusiastically so I could go back to sleep, when I started thinking about things we’d bought over the years.

So here’s the question. What’s the best thing you’ve ever bought?

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By the time I went to bed on Monday night I was sick to death of the sight of fridge/freezers, measurements and cubic capacities were running round my head, but I couldn’t ignore the fact we still didn’t have one and time was running out.

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I’ve often worried, during the power cuts we get here from time to time, about the food in the freezer and how long it would last, should the power not return within a reasonable time scale, say 12 hours or so.  Well not any more.

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Well April really has been a wash-out. Apart from planting out my peas and broad beans, I’ve done no gardening. In an attempt to stave off the boredom, I’ve been adding to my limited HTML code writing skills by learning how to do tables.

Here you will find a selection of my favourite things in table form. How cool is that? Just mouse over the pictures for full details.

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‘Every day’s a school day’ is one of Peter’s favourite sayings. He mostly uses it when trying to understand the many foibles of his computer, but to be honest you can use it in just about any area of life. Basically, you might be old, you might think you know it all and have seen it all, but the truth is you don’t and haven’t, and almost everyday there are new opportunities, some voluntary, some by force of circumstance, to learn more.

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At the end of March I was struggling to keep my seedlings watered and protected from the sun. A week later I was struggling to keep them warm and protected from frost!

Although it has warmed up slightly and the sun is shining from time to time, there is a wickedly cold wind, so whilst I’m waiting for some warm weather to return, my thoughts have turned to indoor pursuits.

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After the success of Stage 1 of our new project, (doing up the old settle) we decided to make Stage 2 more interesting by making it into a sort of game. All the work and improvements we’d done so far had been done from bits and pieces we had in ‘stock’ and hadn’t cost us a penny. The challenge now was to complete the entire project in the same vein.

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A few days ago I wrote about the newly delivered oak settle that is to be our latest project, and how I was initially disappointed at the shabby state it was in. I needn’t have worried.

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