We’d had the meal that my Aunt had cooked with help from her friend. We’d had lovely pudding. We’d done the quiz and my cousin’s team won. We were about to eat birthday cake when something happened.

At about 10:30ish, one of the girls from the party had been heading home and something happened so she’d come back to the building – a lady had slipped over in the alleyway behind the church and couldn’t get up – they’d called an ambulance but it was so snowy that the ambulance hadn’t got through yet.

Well a bunch of us, grabbed coats jumpers and a blanket and went to offer what help we could. When the ambulance did arrive I was shivering and my hands were hurting as I hadn’t stopped for my gloves or coat, I was in a hoodie and went for it (I know bright spark!)

We were waiting for the ambulance and it was getting to the point that this lady was getting really really cold the adrenaline from hurting herself wasn’t keeping her warm. The coats and blanket etc were just soaking up the snow and not really helping. She made the call that she wanted to get into the wheelchair (her friend had been to borrow it from a neighbour in the hope that she could get the lady into the chair without assistance but the lady couldn’t put weight on her leg and her friend couldn’t take enough of her weight to get her into the chair).

I was on the handle bars leaning on the chair to make sure it didn’t over balance. Various people grabbed a hand or an arm and then did what they could to manpurve the lady into the chair, my uncle then helped me push the chair in the snow for the lady to sit herself down in once we’d got her upright.

We all kept chatting to the lady and thankfully the ambulance arrived not much later. The chap in the ambulance got us to pull the wheelchair backwards round the alley way to the ambulance. I had one side, our “honorary” uncle (he’s the youth leader at my old church and everyone called him Uncle even though only 4 of the youth group were actually his nieces/nephews!) was on the other side and Chris was on the same side as me.

The lady kept saying how lovely we were and how lucky she was that’d we’d been at the church and been able to help and things like that.

My hands were red, very sore and cold and the snow had soaked into my socks (I wasn’t really dressed for snow) but I’m glad that our team of good samaritans were there to help otherwise she’d have been sat in the snow for nearly half an hour if not a bit longer given the amount of snow and how unclear the roads were.

Thank you to the ambulance service – it took some time but they got there and the guy was lovely and friendly.

Joining up with Lauren at The Little Things We Do for today’s post.

As Lauren is getting used to being a new mummy, today’s blanks were supplied by Meg of Mr. C & Me.

1. If money wasn’t an issue, the first thing I’d cross of my life list is take the time off work to travel to Australia and New Zealand so that I can catch up with friends like Loz and Sheens and meet friends like Ruby and Branden from Sew, Cook, Create! for the first time in person. Also get to see all those places I’ve seen on the Internet and in films.

2. Ham, cheese and ketchup sandwiches is something I like that other people think is weird.

3. If my life were a movie right now, the title would be “The Blogger” yeah I know so not original then again it could be “The Deep Freeze” – its minus 3 Celsius (30ish Fahrenheit) tonight. It was like minus 6 last night at one point. (Our house is also really cold and I can’t work out if that’s just me, whether I didn’t warm up properly from earlier or if it is actually that cold in here.)

4. Three things I am looking forward to this month are catching up with my girlies from university, hosting the women’s breakfast at church (it’s my first time and I’m kinda bricking it so prayers would be appreciated!) and and celebrating my cousin’s 18th birthday.

5. My favorite song to sing in the shower is it really depends what I’m listening to at the time. So at the moment it’s Hallelujah I Love Her So or Crazy Arms by Hugh Laurie. (I am absolutely loving his album at the moment. In fact as I write this post it’s playing.)

6. If I found out that the production of Milky bar White Chocolate or Milky Way bars was ending this month, I’d go out and buy as much as I could tomorrow.

7. One thing I’ll never grow tired of is music. It’s always changing and being rewritten or tweaked. As long as there is live music I’ll be a happy chicken lol.

January

Books Read
The Cause Within You by Matthew Barnett
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Places Visited
Ikea at Milton Keynes
The Lyceum in London – The Lion King

Films Seen
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
The Iron Lady

The Month In Bullets

• Got a HP Laptop to review which was really exciting – unfortunately it didn’t beat my MacBook so I’m still a MacGirl.
• I met up with an old school friend – I think I worked it out that I’d seen her three times in the past 5ish years since I left university but it could have been longer than that. We spent 3.5 hours chatting in Pizza Hut – I’m pretty sure that the waiters wanted to get rid of us but given that it wasn’t quite the dinner run and lunch had been over for a quite a while it wasn’t the end of the world for us just to sit and chat.
• I retook the plunge and set up a FB page for my blog again (having deleted it in a hasty moment). You can find it here - Like me while you’re there please.
• I’m working on tidying the house – I stood in the kitchen and cried at one point during January because I just felt like I was treading water against the tide – I think I still feel that way a bit but I’ve talked to Chris about the home stuff and to my manager about the work stuff and hopefully somewhere the two will meet and balance out a bit.
• I went to see The Lion King in London again – it was awesome.
• I ended up being tour guide for my little group (of 3) getting from Bedford to the restaurant where we were meeting for dinner – it was kinda exciting being in that position of responsibility lol.
• We went out for dinner with the Elders and Deacons from church – it’s Chris’s last one this year as he stepped down at Christmas. We went to Riverside Grill in Castle Quay which was really nice (but a bit pricey – nearly £40 for two of us – then again maybe I’m just used to a large pizza between three of us fro like £15 or something lol)
• Still working on losing weight – I’m around 72kg (I did weight myself one day in the bedroom rather than the bathroom and the carpet upset the scales – it was pretty cool weighing 71.2kg for a little while but then I figured I couldn’t pretend to be lighter lol.)

I spend yesterday evening at dinner and the night before I watched The Young Victoria while babysitting and writing my appraisal for work.

I’ve also been playing alot with Pinterest. You can click on that clever big p and it will take you to my profile if you’re on there. I’m part of two shared boards which is interesting as you then have two or three (or more) pinning ideas for different things.

Well I need to go and finish up some bits and head bed-wards.

Source: etsy.com via Anna on Pinterest

You can find my boards here.

Source: myprojectcalledlife.blogspot.com via Hannah on Pinterest

100 Word Challenge: Week 29

I call her from the other side of the world and her phone goes straight to voicemail.

“Mum, I’m pretty sure when your only daughter is the other side of the world, you don’t ignore international calls in case it’s an emergency.” I paused, I was joking but she might take it as a telling off.

“Mum, I’m going to be landing at Heathrow on Wednesday. The project finished early – it made more sense to come home then hang around and fork out for a hotel.”

I hung up the phone.

Twenty four hours to kill, what should I do?

Dear CJ, You got very excited after reading my blog plan a few minutes ago – I’m not entirely sure if you read this though so maybe the plan it is – I am glad though that you show off my blog when you have website meetings.

Dear Our Sidekick, I am still so chuffed about your pizza from the weekend – can you make another one please? I printed off the FB comments about it and I’m going to print out a picture – then again I’m going to get a lot of pictures printed – we need to start your journal/scrapbook thing.

Dear Cousin V, you turned 18 a few weeks ago and it’s your party this weekend – ROCK ON!

Dear CJ (Yes you get two a la Today’s Letters) My appraisal is on Wednesday and I’m a bit nervous about it – will you give me a super big hug so I feel extra spesh?

I managed to snap this one above while Our Sidekick got ready – he’d had to get the scales from our room as Chris had been using them for weighing items to put on eBay and then him and Chris got all the ingredients out of the cupboard and I retreated to the living room to stay out of trouble.

This was the amazing finished article – I posted a picture on Twitter and Facebook and the number of amazing uplifting encouraging comments that came in were awesome. I’m going to print off the Facebook page and stick it into Our Sidekick’s journal/scrapbook so that he can look back and remember how those people encouraged him.

So this is going to sound crazy – as mad as this is I like the idea – so what if I got rid of all my reading books. I know, I know how crazy am I given that I’ve spent a bunch of my wages on books or DVDs. I make a list of all the physical books and sell them or give them away. I can then get a Kindle and collect the books in that realm. Okay so I’ve always been for the paper books as there is something about holding the book and turning the pages – but what if I cleared the book cases.

How many of my DVDs do I actually watch? How many on the shelf haven’t I watched since I bought them – what if I took them in and traded them in at the second hand store – okay I might just get 50p or so per film but given the price of downloads via iTunes and other media platforms – do I need the actual DVDs? Is there a legal way of copying them to a hard drive rather than having the physical disc? There are films I miss at the cinema but what about just downloading them – I can store them on a hard drive and then play from there (DVD nights might have to change but who knows people I know might adopt my DVDs)

So let’s start with the books – I can solve that one easier.

1. Let’s make a list of my books.
2. I sell them or given them away. I can post a list here on my blog and you cover the shipping (and maybe some towards the book), or I sell outright on eBay or swap them somewhere like BookMooch. If that doesn’t work I give them away – there are plenty of charity shops in Bedford. The money from selling the books will in the long run cover the cost of the Kindle (other eReaders are available lol)
3. I then have two empty book cases – I can Freecycle them, advertise in the church newssheet or put them in at the local auctions.

Yeah it would be crazy and some things would be easier than others but what about it? I acquire bits, I can only just close the cupboard in my bedroom because it looks like a bomb blew up in it. In a way I started this a week ago by offering some unused fabric on FB and Twitter (it was taken by a FB friend).

Over to You

• Am I crazy or is it a case of “One’s junk is another’s treasure”?
• Can you imagine doing it?

More information can be found at Life. Edited.