Days 38 to 42 (Easter Weekend!)

Well, back from the Easter weekend and managed to grab some time to update the blog - tried adding some photos but got an error (grr) so will try again later...

What a great bank holiday weekend it was! It was so lovely to be out in the sunshine all weekend, really felt like summer was here! We drove over to the in-laws on Friday morning and got there in time for lunch (raspberry shake for me!), then decided to pop into Milton Keynes with h2b's Step-father to sort out suits for the wedding. The first shop we went into was really disappointing as they only had samples of everything and had to order in specially just to try the outfits on - not good when you're trying to try a few on to see which looks best!

Found Moss Bros round the corner though and popped in there - much better as they had a huge selection of all the suits to try on. They had better waistcoats too so we opted for them in the end. Signed all the paperwork, now we just have to get the rest of the wedding party to pop into their local Moss Bros to get measured! Took some pictures too so we don't forget what it looks like!

Got back to the house early evening then popped over to the field to feed & rug the horses (strangely I always volunteer for this bit!!), then had dinner. I'd brought all my food packs but had forgotten some essentials like my sweeteners and my reusable greaseproof paper - luckily they had some but it wasn't the same and made my poppadoms taste funny. The microwave there is also somewhat of an antique and so it took me about 3 1/2 minutes to make 1 poppadom (at home it's just over a minute!). I then baked a fruit bar into biscuits and proceeded to burn it - typical!! It's one of the things that makes it so awkward being away from home as you have to learn all the timings from scratch again...still, never mind, as I can always resort back to soup and shakes if I need to...

I had my hair trial on Saturday morning, which went quite well, only I had managed to leave the pictures I'd cut out / printed off in a folder at home so only had a few token ones to show her. Not sure if she really got what I was trying to explain to her, but she put my hair up a few different ways and it looked pretty good, so I have confidence it'll all be ok on the day. I'm really nervous about the hair actually as I've had a few trials (and one disastrous bridesmaid experience) where someone professional has 'done' my hair and I've ended up absolutely hating it. She took some photos for me but when I got back home and looked at them properly, none of them had come out particularly well :-( Anyway, it's given me something to think about and I still have time to rethink the hair if I need to.

Spent the rest of Saturday and all day Sunday in the paddock, digging up and trying to level bits of it for the marquee and re-grassing some of the bare bits. The lady in the next field is very kindly letting us use it for car parking for the wedding, so we also had to take part of the fence down, dig out & level the gap, then hack back all the brambles. Was exhausting work but felt really good afterwards and by the time we finished on Monday morning the place was looking fab. Remembered to take my camera over to the fields when I fed the horses on Sat night and took some photos which I'll (hopefully) include here:

Russ and his ball - he followed me around all weekend with his ball whilst I was trying to dig up the paddock!

Aconite the Exmoor posing for photos as usual...

The gap in the fence after all the hard work, digging and bramble-hacking (the scars are healing well ;-)

Chilli investigating the theodolite whilst we're trying to measure the field!

Sunset and Toffo (the pony in the next field!)

The weekend was over far too quickly as always - we drove back after lunch on Monday and pottered around the house, then Laurie turned up from his walking expedition in the Lakes so we vegged out for the evening as we were all so knackered.

Tuesday work was pretty busy, lots to get through this week and it's a short week which doesn't help. Definitely getting fed up of the lack of variety in my packs (veggie soup again?!?) so can't wait to go to the new LL tomorrow evening!