June already?

Yes, it's June already and the longest day today too!  Hard to believe really looking out the window.  Today we have a mix of rain, cloud and yet more rain.  Beginning to wonder if we will actually have a Summer this year.

The last few months have been full on with work, in fact, for our little business year 5 has been our busiest to date (not that we're complaining!).

The lovely ladies choir that I belong to finally put on their concert back in April after 9 months of busy rehearsal.  We raised around £1600 in total half of which went to Short Cross Methodist Church and the other half toward research into Lupus.  Since then we've taken the concert out to a couple of other venues and we'll be performing again on Saturday night but this time in aid of Birmingham St Mary's Hospice who do invaluable work offering help and support to people with terminal illness.  This should then be our last performance of 'Film Fantasia' and then we'll have a short break before starting up again later in the Summer.

 

The school choir will be performing their Summer concert next Tuesday after rehearsing since January.  During the last few weeks we've taken a small group from the choir to sing at the Salvation Army's Birmingham Citadel and also at the 'Time Out' group's Jubilee Party.  We were made to feel very welcome on both occasions and children sang their hearts out.  They're more than ready now to perform their final concert and I think we're all a little sick of the songs if I'm completely honest!

My running has recently come to a bit of a standstill unfortunately due to some health worries.  Everything now looks to be clear so I'm hoping to get out for a run at the weekend.  This will be my first in 2 months so as you can imagine I think I'll struggle to get to the end of the street rather than manage the 7 miles level I'd finally reached.  It's a bit disappointing really as I felt I was doing so well, but I'm determined to get back to it and build it up gradually again as I did before.

The family are all well.  The school year seems to have whizzed by so fast, can't believe 'A' is nearly at the end of her first year of high school.  It doesn't seem 5 minutes since we were stressing about how she'd settle in.  'S' has had a good first year of study for his GCSE's and has done some marvellous things in Music in particular.

'P' celebrated his birthday at the start of the month so thought it was about time he booked in his birthday present from LAST year.....White Water Rafting.  See my next post for all the fun and photos!  He's still running and his performance has come on no end since he's been regularly running with the club.  He has another race tomorrow in Blakedown and during March managed to win 1st place in the competition on RunBritain for most improved running handicap..

Arnold celebrated his 2nd birthday on Tuesday.  Hard to believe he's been part of our family now for 2 years.  I can still remember when he first came home with us, I had to wear my knee length boots around the house in the peak of Summer to fend off his feisty puppy needle teeth!  Well worth the pain though, we wouldn't be without him :).

Goodbye 2011 - A quick catch up

After an unintentional and rather long break from blogging, 2012 sees my return!

The end of 2011 was tied up with family life, choirs and A LOT of reorganising on the business front.  December saw us take the school choir to the huge Young Voices event at the LG Arena in Birmingham (see here for last year's Young Voices post) along with a trip to the local Merry Hill Centre for their annual Choir Competition.  Although, we weren't successful with the latter, the kids did themselves proud and we couldn't have asked them to do more.  I was pretty choked up after their performance I can tell you.

Things have been extremely busy with work, this being the main reason for my absence from blogland (and cardmaking and crafting and basically anything fun!).  We have been evaluating our business by means of several review workshops with a local company.  This has seen us assessing our client base, finances and the services we offer in order to re-evaluate and push things forward from 2012 onwards.  Doing the business review has helped us immensely.  We now feel that rather than drifting from one contract to the next, we have an aim and a plan that will see our business grow, year on year.  In fact I'm quite excited about the potential things we have lined up for this year.

Ladies choir kicks off again tonight and we're making great progress with our rehearsals for the upcoming concert in April.  Three more harmonised songs to get through and then we're all done with the 'learning' part.  Only staging and a bit of choreography to master then and we're good to go.  School choir starts up again next week and I have a hell of a lot of work to do before then, preparing, recording and editing music. (Had most of the music since Sept and still only just got around to doing anything with it!).

'A' performed in 'Hairspray' with Youth Onstage at the beginning on December.  A fabulous show with some super performances.  Although, part of the chorus, 'A's confidence has grown no-end since she joined the group.  She struggled with the late nights this time and looked a little washed out by the end of it all.  She's decided to take a break from the next performance to give herself opportunity to try some of the drama available at school.

Christmas 2011 has been a far more relaxed one than of late.  Due to our busy work schedule during the lead up to the festive season, we were more than happy to simply chill and spend time as a family.  It was our turn to invite the family on Christmas Eve and this saw us offering our usual quiz to keep everyone entertained.  It's been nice having the children at home but I feel ready now to get organised and take on whatever the new year has to throw at me.

October update and a change of scenery

First of all, sorry!  Long time no post!

Things have been a bit busy recently.  Work has picked up, which of course is good but just means things are a bit more hectic.  Have been spending a lot of time over the last couple of weeks making updates to the website and looking at marketing strategies for the business.  We have a couple of meetings lined up this week too which should help things along.  Our lease now looks like it will be extended into 2012 which is good news as it means not having to start hunting for appropriate business premises again, which is just impossible!

'A' is still loving high school and has now been set for some of her subjects, really pleased that she's been placed in the top band for English and Maths.  She's joined the school orchestra and after a shaky start is now enjoying the sessions each week.  Her rehearsals are also well under way for Youth Onstage's production of Hairspray that will run at the end of November.  'S' finally decided to stick with his GCSE music option after much deliberation but has changed from Woodwork to Food Tech which we are enjoying as much as him as we get to sample his culinary delights :).



Finally decided last week that the grubby cream walls in the lounge just had to go!  We'd actually bought some green floral wallpaper samples back from B&Q some time ago with the intention of revamping the bedroom, but after buying the new sofa's we decided to go for this scheme in the lounge.  I trekked off to B&Q on Thursday to stock up on the supplies (Dulux Malt Chocolate and Laurence Llewelyn Bowen wallpaper) and we spent the weekend filling, painting, glossing and wallpapering.  Poor Arnold has spent the majority of this time behind his gate watching the proceedings.  I don't think he could quite work out why he'd been shut out but I think after last night's stressful wallpapering events and profanities he was quite glad to be as far away from me as possible!  All in all though I think we did well to get it all done in one weekend and we're both really pleased with the results.  Just curtains to buy now once we find some we like.



 

 

 

Coffee and cake

Friday morning saw our little business taking part in the 'World's Biggest Coffee Morning' in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support.  This is a yearly event that is organised in support of a very worthy cause.  Friday 30th September was the official 'Coffee Morning' date but I know supporters were running events nationwide throughout last week.

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I spent Thursday baking cakes in preparation for Friday's event and for those of you who know me, you know this is not a common occurrence.  Thursday afternoon I headed down to our offices to prepare, I took a bundle of handmade cards I'd created and we decided to also have a book sale due to the fact we have tons and tons of dust laden books just sitting in the loft!

[caption id="attachment_1146" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Coffee Morning at PSS"][/caption]

Although I'd promoted our little event through Facebook and via emails to work colleagues and clients we were still unsure how many visitors would turn up.  In fact with mom, mom-in-law, Adrian, Sally, 'A', 'P' and myself we thought we may have more 'helpers' than 'visitors' but as the clock neared 9.30 our first callers arrived.  From then on we had a steady flow until 12pm.

I was pleased to hear that people were enjoying the cakes that myself and others had supplied and my card creations went down a treat!  In fact out of around 20 cards I only returned with 6!

[caption id="attachment_1147" align="aligncenter" width="224" caption="Cakes galore!"][/caption]

All in all with the minimal visitors we had we still managed to raise just over £100 which isn't bad at all.  We've already decided to sign up for the event next year but think we may do things slightly differently maybe by either running a Saturday morning event or and cheese and wine evening.  Thank you to all the lovely supporters that stopped by x