I'm back!!

Well, I've had a break! But I'm back now, I don't know if I'm refreshed, but I'm back anyway!!

Lots of things have happened, but I won't tell you about them all now, that would take far too long!!

It turns out I don't have Cealiacs after all. What I have got remains a mystery!!

The girls continue to ride, and are now joining pony club. It really is a good deal you know. At the moment I pay £10 each for half an hour's lesson, and £5 each for half an hour stable management. For £22 a year they can join Pony Club (without their own horse) and once a month meet up for the day, ten til four, ride, learn and have fun. They can take riding tests, earn badges, compete and camp!! Ideal if you ask me! Just wish I was under 21, I wanna join! Find out more here.

I have also started riding again, yay!! A lady just down the road from me has three horses, Ippy, Echo and Gayly, that I and lovely girl have been exercising and also I have been riding for a woman locally who has ride and drive horses. Advertising time!! Felicity and her husband John have a beautiful holiday home in a very secluded and beautiful spot in the Welsh countryside. Felicity also runs driving courses, check it out here. Felicity's five year old is a bit fizzy so I accompany her on hacks on her old faithful, Champ, who provides a calming influence to help Archie settle. There is also Belle, a three year old who will be broken to drive this summer and also, hopefully, I will be helping back her too.

This weekend I am hoping to take Gayly on a fun ride, The Llandinam Mountain Event. Weather permitting of course, becaue it really has been quite crap, hasn't it?

Apart from that, well, we have new chicks in the fold after a broody hen got a present of fertile eggs. She hatched seven out of seven, we lost two but the rest are coming on fast.

Sadly we lost Bella, one of the battery hens. But Cinnamon has integrated wonderfully and is now living in the big house with the other girls.

Jedi has been to school camp, and had a wonderful time, abseiling, cayaking, orienteering, caving and a world of other things!!

The cats have been bringing me headless rabbits on a regular basis (eewwww!), I haven't seen my husband in just over a month, oh and I took this cracking pic of Harley;

Nice to be back :)

100th post and an end in sight!

Sorry I haven't been about lately, I haven't been too good actually. It's something I don't talk about much but I suffer from Fibromyalgia. I have done for a very long time and it took years to get a diagnosis. My sister was diagnosed with M.E. a very long time ago and was really very poorly for a while. After going to the doctor with a whole variety of weird symptons and discussing them with my sister, i realised there were similarities. My sister showed me some information on Fibro and I realised that was it!! My doctor had been pretty useless uo until I presented him with the information, and I got my diagnosis about five years ago.

Since then my sister has discovered that she actually has multiple chemical sensitivity not M.E. M.E. is such a vague term. When the chemicals she is exposed to are controlled my siser now lives a fairly normal life. We think both our problems were casued by exposure to Organo Phosphates and that's why we both suffer. My chemical sensitivity is not as marked as my sister's but I still have to avoid certain things.

I have coped with my Fibro relatively well over the years and have been determind to leave a relatively normal life and not let it get to me, I think that's why I don't really talk about it. Most of the people I know don't even know I have it!! Recently I have been quite poorly and my health is deteriorating. I am loosing weight, and completely unable to put it back on. My fatigue levels are high, my skin poor and my pain levels have increased. My digestive system is also a complete mess. So last week I was off to my new doctor for a moan. It looks like I may have Celiacs Disease. A very daunting prospect!! I didn't know much about Celiacs, I thought it was an allergy. Turns out it's an auoto-immune problem where the body's immune system sees Gluten as a bad thing and attacks it,, causing damage to the intestines. The damage caused stops the proper absorbtion of nutrients etc from your food.

The only cure is to completely stop the intake of Gluten for the rest of my life. The prospect is extremely scary but if it means I can get well, have more energy for my children and generally live a much healthier life then it actually makes the diagnosis an exciting possibility!! I hope that makes sense!! Any no doubt I will have more to say about this new journey so I will let you know how it progresses. I will also try to update you on all the 'normal' things that have been happening! But for now I'm am hoping you are all feeling better than me!

ABC Wednesday - G

G is for so many things this week, like Gosh I've been busy, for a start!! (I haven't posted since last Wednesday!!) G is for Greyhounds of course (see this post here, updates soon!) But most of all G must be for Gatherings.

An old school friend of mine attempted to organise a school reunion last weekend. It didn't quite come off. Only five people turned up!! I don't think she gave people enough warning and so many just couldn't make it. It was, however, a wonderful evening. It gave me the chance to go back to my home town in Somerset and not only catch up with a few old school friends, but also my old mates from 'home'.

On my first day of high school I met H. We became firm friends immediately and stayed that way all the way through school. After school she moved to London and we lost touch for a while but after making contact again we now keep in touch, although we don't see nearly enough of eachother. We also formed a little group with two lads, S and J. We were all pretty close.

H and S made the Gathering, but unfortunately none of us know where J is. What a shame, it was so good to get 3 quarters of the group together and catch up on old times, but it would have been something else if it had been complete.

Anyway, next year is our 20 year anniversary of leaving high school. I can't quite believe it, I mean, I think I'm only 20 anyway!! And thanks to the wonder that is Facebook, I am making contact with more and more of my old school friends, and the plan is to organise a massive reunion Gathering for that.

Here's the old Gang

Don't we look snazzy in our matching dark Glasses!

To see more ABC Wednesday G posts visit here.

ABC Wednesday - F

Wednesday has come round really quick!! Anyway, this week's letter is F for Fundraising.

My eldest daughter, Jedi, (for those of you who don't know) has a passion for Greyhounds and for raising awareness of their plight. Along with this comes the need to raise money to help rehome and reabilitate ex-racing Greyhounds. To find out how this passion started please read my previous post.

Anyway, once again she has the urge to Fundraise. This time she is planning a sponsered silence, not any old sponsored silence, but for a whopping 48 HOURS!!! That is quite a feat for an eleven year old!

Greyhound Rescue Wales is her chosen charity, as it is our local Greyhound charity and of course you can't support them all! We are currently waiting for GRW to register with JustGiving.com so we can make this the biggest and furthest reaching fundraising effort yet. So if you would be interested in sponsering Jedi, and helping abandoned, ill-treated or just plain unwanted Greyhounds wherever you are, please keep an eye out for a future post (hopefully within the next week) which will give details on how to find her JustGiving page. Or leave a request in the comments and I will notify you when we have the information.

Remember, this is all off the back of an eleven year old with a very big heart, nothing to do with me, I'm just the skivvy!! Please show your support, not just for the Greyhounds but for a wonderful little girl who has the want and determination to do something bigger with her time and energy.

Chickens, Gardening and Springfever!!

The last couple of days, while I've had a week off (Ihave such a great job, that means I get all the school holidays off!) I have been doing a bit of gardening. I thought it was time time to tackle my overgrown borders before everything starts growing in again. Trouble is the soil is terrible, it is practically pure clay. It makes digging it twice as hard as other soil. Every fork full weighs a ton, it sticks to the fork and mostly stays in large clumps. In about a total of five hours digging I have dug over and weeded such a small amount.

It does look amazing though, it lifts the whole look of the garden. I've dug in well rotted chicken and rabbit litter and tried to convince the girls not to feed all my precious worms to the chickens. I am hoping the more compost I dig in the better the soil will get, but I am also guessing it will take some time.

The weather has been quite good for the last couple of days and I am hoping it will stay dry for a while so I can get some more done before I go back to work. The chickens have had a great time digging in the freshly uncovered earth and compost and the cats have been enjoying the sunshine. I think they are starting to feel spring in the air. Little clumps of snowdrops are appearing and everyone seems to have a bounce in their step.

I am also glad it is mild at the moment for an entirely different reason. We didn't have a cat flap, so hubby made a whole in the 'dining room' wall, lined it will tiles and attached a cat flap to the outside. Now, seeing as how he's a builder it was never quite finished. (Anyone who's been married to a builder knows that they don't finish their own house!) But it was perfectly operational and did a good job..... until one of next doors big fluffy cats decided to visit. She came through the cat flap but before she could get out of the tunnel into the dining room she met Harley. Harley was non too impressed and expressed his disapproval of the uninvited guest as only disgruntled cats can. Mocha attempted a hasty retreat and being a rather large puss with a lot of excess fluff, must have got caught up. She ripped the cat flap off and the tiles all collapsed. I now have a cat hole!!. They love it!! Much quicker when you are being chased by your brother!! Stretch (our neighbour) has promised to fix it for us, but for now at least it is mild and dry!

THE Riding Lesson

At last, the day came when the girls could get their bums back in the saddle. Because they haven't ridden for about two years and we're going to a new riding school, they are starting out back on the lead rein.

Here they are listening intently to their instructions:


It was wonderful that they were the only ones in the class, you can imagine what their old classes must have been like with 15 or so kids in one small indoor school. Just look at the space they had and the attention from their instructor.

Trouble is on the left and Jedi on the right:

Trouble struggled a bit to keep her reins short enough and when she asked her pony to stop by sitting deep in the saddle and reducing movement, he ignored her (at first) and she ended up with her hands round her ears!! After a while he started to listen and she did a great job.

Jedi tries so very hard to sit up straight she sometimes becomes a bit stiff so in rising trot she sometimes leans forward and ends up with her bum sticking out!! (Sorry Jedi, if you read this :P) But after a bit of relaxing in sitting trot she soon got it whipped.

I think they did great, two years is a long time in the life of small people. Next time they are booked in for half an hour stable management too. Trouble needs a bit of confidence on the ground, I guess that's the problem with being so small, everything else is so darn big!!

This is Jedi's Dougle:

This is Trouble's Dougle:

Sorry about the blurry pics, it was lunch time and they weren't really interested in posing!! And this fella here just wanted to kill anyone who came near his dinner!!!!

So we went home for our own, all full of smiles.

Bethddusuit's Recommended Read

I have decided to give a shout out to all my favourite bloggers so Thursday is going to become;

I am going to go through my reading list, from top to bottom, and each Thursday write about one blog. I do have quite a few, so it may take a while, but I hope you enjoy maybe finding new blogs and finding out what amuses me! So without further fuss or bother I present you with the first blog in my list;


A View From The Green Barn

A View From The Green Barn is written by Don, an elementary school teacher from Michigan. He lives and writes from his little farm, surrounded by chickens, woods and wonderful scenery. Don always posts the most amazing photos of the farm, chickens and other beautiful things, and I enjoy looking at these as much as catching up with hatchings, gardening plans, bread making and general goings on. Don is a friendly chap who always makes the effort to respond to comments on his blog and to leave comments for others. I'n not sure how he has the time though, what with all his fans!

So, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Don for a fanscinating blog and for all the kind comments he has left for me. So why don't you pop on over to Michigan, visit Don and say Hi.