Quilting with a cold

I have been officially without control of my sinal passages or bronchials for ten days now and I think I have officially gone mad! I think I have drunk the equivalent to the Thames river in water, juice, chocolate soy milk and soup... I have slept for hours on end and been an insomniac and still I am sick. I am loosing my brain!
I must be getting better however since I have started to re-piece my quilt. I finally finished ripping ALL the stitches out on Tuesday. I have done a little research and am using a completely different method which combines both hand stitching and machine sewing. I'm actually quite impressed, and look forward to seeing the final product (if I don't burn it in sheer frustration in the middle). Here's the link from the previous blog post that describes what I had originally started...

Convocation

In the freezing, pouring rain hundreds of people lined up outside Canterbury Cathedral to get into one of the UofK Convocations. We weren't allowed to take pictures inside the ceremony which was maddening, but it we amused ourselves in other ways during the ceremony.

Sarah graduated with BSc with honours in Biological Anthropology... If it weren't for spell check I would not have been able to spell that! Since it was the day of Dad's birthday, she carried his doctoral hood with her.
Ed and I played the heckling fan club to a T! We were taking notes through out the service for his own ceremony next year...
Following the service we went to a reception in Sarah's department where we met the professors and colleagues Sarah's been torturing for the last few years... :P
To finish off the evening, the gang of us went to La Stada for a great dinner! My only complaint was the restaurant's lack of wheelchair access... We all had various pizzas and decadent deserts. The food was amazing!

Congratulations Sarah!!!

Happy Birthday Mark!

Believe it or not this was a successfully delicious black forest cake which I made from scratch :D The only thing I didn't do was whip the cream, and guess what went wrong? So it looks a little melted...

I say was... It only took us two days to finish it!
It was a terribly rainy and windy day! We tried to go out to have a nice dinner at a local pub, but it was closed for the Regatta. This meant coming home, eating more cake and watching the fireworks (which we'd forgotten were going to happen) and having a relaxing for the rest of the evening.

New Apartment

As of Sunday Mark and I live in a village surrounded by cafes and regatta crews...The apartment is typical for it's surrounding, ie it's smallish. I don't think it is any smaller than my last apartment though, it's just arranged differently.

One amazing difference is, however that it is clean, fresh, bright and no little children running next to any windows!!
Best of all it has an enclosed patio and garden that we do not have to share with the people who live upstairs.
It is strange in its design. To blend in the area it is a house that has been specifically built for two independent apartments.
The rules as a tenant are much more strict than what I was used to in my first place, so we're minding ourselves a little more than I might have before. One of the rules is of course, no pets. We were warned when we signed the lease that the previous tenant used to feed one of the neighbours' cats and we had to watch the doors as the cat would run in and hide. I think I just met that cat this morning! I went to hang laundry and was startled to see a black and ginger chubby cat running at me meowing. I assessed it wasn't dying of starvation and ignored it. I ate my lunch outside and it came running back again. It dawned on me that the cat had been trained by the sound of the back door opening to come running! It think it's still sun bathing on the patio waiting for me to come out again...