Beetle Bug Fun For Sarah.

Nom, Nom, chocolate beetle/bug Here

A pretty one for the girls.

Here's one for the boys who need an office on the go, rather smart how he did it. Here

Fancey a spot of sailing old gal! This car was driven or rather sailed over the Irish sea, at the end it drove straight up and out of the water. (Malcolm Buchanan crosses the Irish Sea from the Isle of Mann in his roadworthy Beetle.)


NO! you can't smoke in my car silly, it's made of wood. This car really does drive. click here

This one for the bikers, but many more quirky ones here

I can't help thinking that the sign on this one should read "JESTERS", as in clown, is the circus coming to town. click here

A bit shabby, but still some how appealing.


Shiney blue, such a lovely colour and so cute. here

Here's one for the hen night. Only slightly larger than a hen house.

To take you to your wedding, but only if you get married in Gretna Green Scotland.

Fancy a bbq go here to see more


I found this one here this is my favorite.

Over here we call these beetle, but in America you guys call them bugs.Just another little difference in the way we both use words to mean the same thing.
I thought Sarah at Dayspring would like these. If you haven't visited her yet, you really should she lovely click here

NHS At It's Finest.

For those of you in America, who are having to decide whether or not a system similar to our NHS, is right for your country take a few minutes to look at this. Click here the NHS at it's finest.

Now I'm not going to say to you that our system here is the best in the World. It has it's failures and at times it can drive us all nuts. I blame the Government for this and not just the idiots we have in power now (they are mostly like a full blown Muppet show- no offence meant to the Muppets); but rather successive Governments, who have not spent the money our taxes have generate for the NHS wisely, in fact they have wasted millions of it.

I hear that Canada has a system like ours and that it too has it's troubles, my advise for what it's worth is for your Government to take a long hard look at both our NHS and Canada's, then take the very best ideas from both of them and put controls in place to stop all the things that are wrong, happening to yours, should you go for it.

Maybe those who can afford to carry on paying for their own health care, could carry on the way they are, freeing up funds for those who can't.
What is it they say "You can't please all of the people; all of the time" that said, shouldn't health care be a right not a privilege. We are after all, nothing without our health.

I don't mind paying my taxes for the NHS, it's a brilliant service. Our doctors and nurses do an amazing job, often under a huge amount of pressure. I do how ever object to paying out for managers by the truck load who have huge salaries, when a decent wage is fought for by the doctors and nurses.

Thanks to the NHS, I was delivered of 3 healthy children, who were all born with a congenital heart condition, that was actually the reason why I lost 3 previous children, all shortly after their births. Medical advance in the way the NHS dealt with my pre-natal care, meant that I now have 3 children I wouldn't otherwise have. Not only that but they have kept them alive at times of ill health and crisis, doing an amazing job.

While I thank the NHS for their care, I also thank the people of this country that pay millions in taxes for the NHS.
The NHS has it's upsides and it's downsides, but overall most of us have a reason for keeping it and being thankful for it.

By the way the photo at the top of the post is of the first babies born the day the NHS came into being.

Why I love Men

This is great, now I don't know if it is real or fake; there is a lot of comments about it saying it is fake, quite frankly I don't care.
If it's fake it's brilliant. If it's real it's proof that men never grow up and when your having this much fun and madness why would you want to.

Hacked - "Blizzard Entertainment Inc"

This is about to be a massive rant, sorry but I need to get this out of my system.

If I pay for a service, then this is actually what I expect to receive at the very minimum level.
It's not hard and it's not rocket science.

This is how it works,

For My Part:- I give you money every blooming month on the same date, I never miss a payment, my son plays your stupid dumb game which he enjoys and has been playing since 2006. Not every day you understand, but nevertheless over the years, I have spent a fair amount of money on this. I even pay you for extra security, so this does not happen, yet more money you are making from me.

For Your Part:- You take my money and give my son access to the game, you then protect his account and stop people from hacking into it and stealing his account and then going on to sell everything he has built up in the game. Should this occur you will then answer the bloody phone and help us.

Simple really, we don't want the bloody World, we just want what we paid for and if it isn't too much trouble for you to manage to stop this from happening time and time again, after all this is the SECOND time in less than a year that this has happened.

World of WarCraft is owned and run by "Blizzard Entertainment Inc", a large enough company that is more than capable of protecting it's gamers, should it so wish to, would appear that it doesn't actually give a damn.

I have spent the day on the phone, listening to how I am in queue, how I am important to you, how you are experiencing high call demand, how you will now have to close the queue, due to high demand, would I please call again.....................Oh believe me I will call again and again and again and again and again and when I do get through, I really hope you do record this conversation for training purposes.
As for e-mailing you, you'll be getting a copy of this. As will every site that mention World of WarCraft, so that other folks know just how useless you people really are.
After all "we are important to you"

By the way the office am attempting to phone is in France, the time I have wasted on the phone today, I could have used to drive to Dover, get the ferry and drive to their office, it certainly would be quicker than waiting for them to answer the phone.

Shooting Star Fail.

This is the nearest I got to seeing shooting stars last night. We phoned other friends in various parts of the country, but it was pretty much the same for every. We would have gone to visit with friends, if they had had clear skies, but over half the country was under clouds.
I phoned Nutty today, as she lives over halfway up the country and in the middle of nowhere, so no light pollution, but despite being in a garden and not having as much cloud as we had here she never saw a thing.

Oh well next year.
I do hope some of you all enjoyed it, just so you all know, it isn't totally over, our planet will still be passing through Perseid until about 24th August so you will be able to still see the odd one or two.

Just a Little Funny

Just a little funny to start the day off.
You wont get much out of me today as I am too excited about the Shooting Stars. Car is packed already ha ha

Perseid Meteor Shower.

I am very excited right now, just watch this youtube it's only 17 seconds long, but it shows you what I am excited about.




I can't wait for tomorrow night, before it gets dark I will head off with Francis (with an i) and my sister E, towards the south coast in order to get away from any light sources and find a place as dark as dark can be.

WHY? I hear you ask.
Well tomorrow is the annual Perseid meteor shower, I have spent my life watching this and look forward to it a lot every year and I have seen it from many places around the World. It actually lasts about a month to six weeks, but there is always one day when it is at it's best and tomorrow is that day. With the added blessing of being able to see Mars which will be next to the Moon. UK watchers need to look South, if you look at about 01:ooam you will see them very close together.

This natural event has gone on for so long that it is part and parcel of our natural World and has been documented by the Egyptians and Shakespeare to the Apollo astronauts. But it was the Chinese who first documented it.

So what is Perseids meteor shower anyway? Here is what Wikipedia has to say about it.

“The Perseids is a prolific meteor shower associated with the comet Swift-Tuttle. The Perseids are so called because the point they appear to come from, called the radiant, lies in the constellation Perseus. Meteor showers occur when Earth moves through a meteor stream. The stream in this case is called the Perseid cloud and it stretches along the orbit of the Comet Swift-Tuttle. The cloud consists of particles ejected by the comet as it passed by the Sun. Most of the dust in the cloud today is approximately a thousand years old”.

Probably the first notes of Perseids are dated back to year 36 when the Chinese wrote “over 100 meteors flew this morning”. Many other markings of Perseids can be found from Chinese, Japanese and Korean archives. From those days August has been known as a “meteor rich” month.

Here is a youtube that explains it very well, however when it comes to the date they are talking about 2008. Also it lasts about 5mins 33 seconds, but is by far the best explanation of it.



Please remember that your night sky will look different from mine depending on where you are in the World. Also while the 12th/13th is the very best time to see it, it will be with us until about the 24th of August having arrived in our solar system about July 17th. So if you have seen any "shooting stars" it is properly from Perseid.
Another little fact; it is often known as "The Tears of Saint Lawrence" as it occurs around the anniversary of his martyrdom in AD 258.

Windmills.

On Saturday I went with my sister and Francis (with an i) to Gravesend in Kent and due to the fact that a road sign was missing was ended up going too far along one road, but it turned out to be rather good as we came across this windmill with a tea room. Which wasn't open despite the sign saying it would be. I think it would have been nice to take tea there, oh well next time maybe.


I am not sure why it is painted black, but I am going to go back and explore the area, so I will try to remember to ask.
This windmill is in Rye in Sussex on the south coast, quite a good few miles away from the black windmill.
It is in fact a bed and breakfast hotel and is very much larger than the black windmill, if you count the windows above the deck/balcony, you will see that it has 3, where as the black one only has 2 windows. This one also has a wider circumference. It's huge.
However; it isn't as quiet as the black one, which while on the main road is in a tiny village.
This one is right next to the rail line which is a busy one and a river.
This photo was taken from the other side of the railway lines, and you can cross on foot here, it's a bit scary to across as you have to look for the oncoming trains, stay in the white lines when you cross over and make sure you step over the live lines.

The black on is in Kent and the white one is in Sussex.

An Answers For My Blog Buddies.

Some of my wonderful blog buddies have asked me a few questions regrading our beautiful countryside over here in Britain, so I feel that I must explain in a post as it would be fairer and well easier for me to do so.

The first one is what season is it over here?

Now this is a blooming good question, given the summer we have had here this year. At the beginning of Spring, the weather men said that we were in for a barbecue summer hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!, sorry I will now pull myself together.

Not only have we not held a b-b-q, but we haven't been invited to any, the weather is so bad that in general people are holding them spontaneously.
To be fair April, May and most of June were glorious, but by the middle of June the whole thing shifted and it has been very haphazard with some serious rain now for weeks or grey sky's and winds.
Today is a classic example of that, as here in London we have had grey sky and moderate winds, its not cold, just a bit blowy, yesterday and Saturday were beautiful days and we got out to place I call bottle beach, but I will show you more about that on another day. (got photo's and all for you ). The lovely Francis (with an i) is down by the south coast working today and has reported to me that the sun is blazing down there and it's seriously hot, he is only about 50 miles away.

It should now be middle to approaching late summer here, but I barely feel that it started at all this year and as many of you know my camping holiday was a wash out.

One of my buddies also said, that where they live it is a lot greener and that we seem to have more brown in our countryside, I had to look at the photos and realised what my friend meant.

This part of the countryside that we drove through to get to the coast is mostly farming country, in the form of wheat, oats and barley fields and basically the brown fields, we are seeing in the photos are fields that have already been harvested and the yellow brown fields are ones that need to be brought in. If you click on the photo, you will see that there are still a lot of fields to be harvested yet. Some of them may contain winter barley, that is harvested later in the year and use it as an animal feed for the winter months and this would still be fairly brown at this time of year.


In this photo you can just see the top of a brick wall, I should have explained that I was standing on a bridge when I took this photo. We do actually in some areas of this country use stone walls to divide fields, but they are completely different to this type of wall; and are known as dry stone walls, this is because they are held together without any mortar. I will explain this to you all another day, but it is an amazing skill and in the photo below you can see how the fields are divided by the walls and you can also see some walls that need to be rebuilt. This photo is of very small fields that have been divided, but it can be done with much much bigger fields and higher walls. It is a part of our history and traditions that were almost lost to us. Thankfully though there are some people who have revived this tradition and it has seen a resurgence in recent years.

In this smaller photo you can see how by using more regular stones you can get a much neater effect.

Dungeness.

Before you get to the beach at Dungeness on the south coast, you have to drive on to what we discovered is actually a private estate, it's very barren when you first see it, but the open expense of scrub land and marshes are really very beautiful. The mile and a half of shingle is the most unspoilt in Europe.

People live and work here in some of the sweetest little houses and even Buddha has found a peaceful spot.
I really wanted to take more photo's of this house, as it was all black, with very crisp smooth lines and very ultra modern, but the owners were in their garden having a bar-b-que and I didn't want to disturb them, maybe next time I go, I can get some pictures from the front. I do like their little caravan and sneaked this photo.
This is the lovely little cafe right next to the beach and where a miniature train station is. More about that later. The cafe is a great little place and we always call in there. I have been going to Dungeness since my kids were small and we always go to the cafe, they serve good food, make lovely tea and serve a good coffee, the staff are really warm and friendly people.
Here is another little caravan, this one is in the garden of an artist who lives in one of the little houses.
This is one of those little houses that I told you about, although some of them are only one story high a few of them like this one have two stories and the stairs on the left hand lead to a balcony, facing out to the sea.

This round building stands next to the old light and it is where the light house keepers lived, I'm not sure if they still live in there, but the building is occupied.
This is the old light house, the building behind the light house is the nuclear power station at Dungeness. There are two light houses at Dungeness and this one is known as the "Old Light house", it is no longer a working one and in fact you can go in there for a small fee. Once you get to the top, you can look out over the sea and all the scrub land and marshes. You can literally see for miles and on a really clear day you can see right over the English Channel and see France.
We got talking to one of the local artist who lives out there and told us that the reason there are two light houses is because when they built the power station it blocked out the light house and so they had to quickly build a new one.....this maybe one of those sea shanty stories, you know told by the locals to the tourists. Just because they find it funny and because they get sick of answering the same questions.

Dungeness is mostly a nature reserve and Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. You can fish from the beach and also catch crabs there, although I have never found where that part of the beach is. On the shingle itself there are over 300 tpyes of flora and forna, supporting rare spiders, insects and including rare moths and dragonflies.

To find out more about Dungeness and it's surrounding beauty click here

Dungeness

Kent & Sussex Countryside.

On our way to beach combing my sister and I saw these huge sheep in field, now this photo does not really do this animal any justice, has it was huge. We may be "Townies" now but we were raised as country girls, so we do know what sheep look like!!!! This is in Sussex
As we were driving along, I realised that we were between counties, on one side of the road was Kent, as in this photo.
Over the other side of the road was Sussex. As you can see the farmer was busy bringing in his crop, in fact there are 2 combine harvesters in this field. Look for where the dust is blowing and you can just work them out.
Another one of the combines working together, one was going one way down the field and the other was working the opposite way.
Back to Kent, well across the road.
And a little more of Kent, but look folks a blue sky day, which ever county we were in.
If you click on the photo's it brings them up so you can see in more detail, but they are huge when you click on them.