It's Sunday morning and I'm sitting on my bed, Holly is sleeping on the end having decided that it's far too early to actually contemplate doing anything, I love these lazy weekend mornings, my first photo shoot at ten was rescheduled due to a poorly child which means I don't have to be in Saltwell Park until 11am.  It's nice to have just a little extra time to chill and reflect on the week gone by.

I have to say that this week has contained far too much drama and didn't at all end up being the way I thought it would when it began, I had never envisioned that Holly would get viciously attacked by a huge Rottweiler who slipped his lead, and on her first birthday too, sometimes birthdays suck!  At least she ended the day with cake and drugs though so you can't knock that!  She's fine by the way, the dog bit through her tail hence the dressing but that should come off at some point today and after a couple of visits to our lovely vet she's going to be just fine once she gets over the indignity of realising that her tail has been shaven!

I'd also never put it in my planner to discover 2 youths in my kitchen burgling me on Wednesday, that's something you just can't imagine really, I don't want to go into too many details but suffice to say that the police are on the case and they have been amazing.

In spite of such negative events good things have happened this week, I've been asked to housesit  by the loveliest person (thank you, you know who you are) with Looby and Holly et al for a week in Edinburgh in the summer holidays, my most favourite city and I can't wait, I'm sure Iain can't wait either, he'll be having friends round, pizza hut deliveries and all of the other things that go along with your parent being on holiday.  I can't wait to really discover and explore parts of Edinburgh we've never been to before, after all I didn't even know there was a canal there until recently, for all of the years I have been visiting the most beautiful city I know of we always seem to stick to the main city centre or the popular tourist destinations and you know, it's weird really because mostly when I go to cities I want to escape the city centres to explore the places and spaces that aren't so frequented.  I think an Edinburgh holiday is long overdue.  Even Abigail said she may come but it depends on her social life, I'm not going to argue, the worst thing you can ever do is try to make Abigail do something she doesn't want to, actually sometimes asking Abigail to do things she actually wants to do end up in the exact same way.

I hear myself saying sometimes "Man, teenagers are hard work" Looby being on the cusp of such life events had "the chat" at school on Thursday and Friday, I'm fairly sure that's made her decide she doesn't ever want to grow up and yet she continues to grow and change with every day, she's certainly started to exhibit some teenage behaviour, yesterday she didn't want to come with me to work but she didn't want to not come to work with me either so she sat in the cafe in Jesmond Dene for nearly 2 hours whilst I had a couple of lovely photo shoots.

You may remember that I am selling my life on Ebay at the moment, there are only a few hours until the first batch of what has now resulted in 62 separate auctions officially ends.  When the hammer falls I think there are going to be a few delighted Irregular Choice fans sitting patiently waiting for Mr Postman, I cannot believe just how much clutter I am cutting down on, whilst I'll never be a minimalist, the current state of my bedroom shows just how much needless stuff I have accumulated, I'm storing it in here while waiting to go to auction winners, if you fancy a bargain do go and make a bid on my auctions.

I realise that I have for the most part fallen behind on blogging, I still have so much I need to catch up on and I wonder why sometimes life moves so fast that I can't even seem to keep up, I guess my problem is that I can't write without inspiration, I've never been one for scheduling posts because I like to get the writing vibe, go and get out my Mac, sit down and write, I never read it back and so I apologise for any occasional mistakes, misspellings or grammatical errors but I find I write best when it comes straight from within.

One of the things that got stolen in the burglary was Loobys phone so we went out yesterday and replaced it and now she's got a shiny new phone which does things, it's very futuristic for a girl who'd always just loved a blackberry with the proper keyboard but I figured she deserved it for not getting too upset when she had discovered it had been taken.

I've said for a while that I feel sometimes in life you receive tests from above to make sure that you are ready to move on to the next exciting stage in your life, well I can only hope that I have passed all of mine and I'm now into the good phase, the fun phase, the exciting times we'll remember forever, it's my favourite time of year right now, the sunshine, the long days, the promise of summer and 6 weeks of fun, laughter and adventure with my children, truly for me summer time is the time when the living is easy.

The woman who sold her life on Ebay

I've mentioned previously that I had several thousand pairs of Irregular Choice shoes and for whatever reasons I was going to have to sell them (in most cases my feet are too small for them after losing so much weight).  I set about starting to list them all on Ebay on Sunday and then I remembered each and every adventure my shoes had been on so each listing ended up taking an age to write but I do feel that I have rather excelled myself in terms of descriptions and adventures.

Sadly not everything I'm listing on Ebay is quite as exciting as my Irregular Choice shoes but I do feel that I could go about listing most of my life on there.

I can't quite believe some of the things I'm selling but I'm on a bit of a mission to declutter and also to reinvest some of the money into some new camera equipment in my business (should have been a painter, it's so much cheaper) and also I want to be able to pay for Looby and I to have a great holiday in the summer without worrying about anything, obviously Holly is coming along too, I don't want much, just a cosy caravan near a sunny beach or a quaint cottage by the coast, something where we can get away from the stresses and strains of life for a couple of weeks and somewhere we can reconnect with each other and spend some precious time before Looby starts at Secondary school in September, it's a big thing when your youngest goes to Secondary school and I have no doubt that our carefree primary days with no homework and many adventures will be remembered with such fondness in years to come.  I know that the workload of St Marys is going to be a huge shock for Looby, whilst Abigail was ready and doesn't mind doing 2 hours of homework a night she's very different to Looby, there are rather less unicorns in Abigails life and sometimes even their 16 month age gap seems so huge, how can two children so near in age seem so completely different.  It's strange because often I can see the connections between Iain and Looby, similar traits and behaviours though they'd probably never admit it but Abigail is so unique and different that I wonder where her quotient of bohemian is hiding, I'm sure it's in their somewhere but I certainly never expected to have a daughter who wanted to be a politician for the labour party!

Whilst listing all of my shoes on Ebay and telling their stories I really did remember every single one whilst writing the descriptions, a lot of them come from fabulous exciting times and bodacious evenings out, something I rarely have now, or that's maybe a little unfair, I do have nights out but they're much more likely to be a good pub quiz or a dinner with friends than they are likely to be a raucous cocktail filled evening with dancing until the wee hours.  I don't regret a moment of it but I'm glad that life didn't have to continue at that kind of pace forever.

I have 25 items from my life past listed on Ebay at the moment, I could probably list items every day for the next year and still not run out of the extraneous gubbins I seem to have collected, I remember now that I have very little need for most of lifes attachments, I love adventures and experiences and things you can't see or whole but things that you remember forever, the photographs of our lives are the important things to me.  I remember all the time that my youngest child is 11.5 and these days should be cherish and held onto for as long as I possibly can for all too soon in the seemingly sudden blink of an eye they will be over and time will have moved on.  The only way to move on is to start again afresh and that's what I am working on trying to do now.

I don't know if you're reading this because you want my shoes or if you're just one of my regular readers but why not make yourself a cuppa, go check out my listings, my stories, my adventures and you know what, if you want to you can make a bid but maybe you could just spread the word, I would love to be one of those pages that Ebay finds and then highlights as something humerous, it's all good writing practice after all and every single piece of writing I put out there on the internet is one step closer to a publisher finding it and helping me to finish my project.

Weekend bits and pieces

Thought I better do a quick update of various bits and pieces.

Firstly - good luck to Louise and Matthew who's wedding I'm off to later today, watch out for sneaky peaks from their wedding sometime around tommorrow evening.

Wedding Bookings - I have only 1 more wedding to book before I am officially full for 2008 so if you still need a wedding photographer please do call me rather than be disappointed. I may though take on a few more if you're getting married in October, November or if you're having a magical Christmas wedding so please do enquire!!

Portraits, don't forget if you book before next Wednesday you'll get a 50% discount on the session fee so long as you schedule your photoshoot in the next 60 days, I'm happy to say that I've had many bookings and can't wait to meet you all over the next 60 days!! Go on, a family portrait shoot for only £25, I will just say that Venture Photography also have sessions available at £25 however, they charge £100 for a 10x8 print, I charge £10.99, it's a no thinker really! Oh and you won't find me in a studio, all my portraits are shot on location in my own unique style!!

The funny ways of google - in June 2006 I wrote a blog post called "what's happened to Ebay" I think it's one of the number 1 search terms that people find my blog for, LOL, anyways from what I can gather listing stuff on Ebay has become even more troublesome, I have a pile of Nintendo DS games to sell and I'm not sure I have the time to list them, perhaps I should just take them all down to Grainger Games, I'll have to ask my son and see what he thinks about that idea!

Well folks thats all for now, I'm just chilling and relaxing until my trust assistant picks me up for todays wedding, it's a relaxed late afternoon affair and I really can't wait!!