My life in pictures #13

This is DC almost falling asleep trying to deflate our friend's air bed on Sunday morning, the morning after quite a few drinks the night before. And this wasn't even the funniest part... it actually deflates electrically by itself with the flick of a switch although our friend happened to keep this small piece of information to herself until the air bed was almost in the bag!

Dans x

My life in pictures #12

This is Joe. We met when we were eight, and he is my oldest and dearest friend. We went to primary school together, secondary school, college... and then he left me to go and study at Manchester Met, and he's never come home! He comes home about four times a year and I've been to visit him a handful of times. He's one of those friends where it doesn't matter if we don't see each other for months, we just pick up where we left off and have lots to talk about.

We've fallen out twice during our 17 year friendship... one when we were drunk and 17 and he broke my camera, and the other time when we were drunk and 17 (I see a pattern emerging here) in an indie club and I told him that I didn't like his girlfriend (I'm too honest, she wasn't good for him). But we made up quickly and other than that he's always looked after me.

I'm lucky to have a friend like him. Everyone should have a Joe in their life!

Dans x

My life in pictures #11

I am sat here with a stinking cold looking out of the window at the rain thinking, where did the lovely Bank Holiday go? It just whizzed by so fast! We had such a great weekend with friends and family.

 

 

First up was our friends' wedding that we had been looking forward to for soooo long. DC tried his shirt on in Topman and then bought it online, and he made the mistake of leaving it to try on until 10pm Friday night - and it didn't fit! I don't understand how that happens to often when they're supposed to be exactly the same size! So we had a panic trip into town at 8:30am Saturday to swap his shirt.

Here's me with some of the bride's closest friends, two of who were bridesmaids and one did a reading. It was raining in the morning before we left but after the ceremony the sun came out and it was beautiful.

 

The wedding breakfast was amazing - we had caramelised onion tart for starter, chicken for main course and a mix of three desserts - meringue, chocolate brownie and a passionfruit cheesecake - I obviously took no photos because it would have been a bit rude.

 

How much of a genius idea was the wedding favour? A mini bottle of Baileys from Mr & Mrs Bayley - genius!

 

The wedding breakfast didn't finish until 6.30pm so it went straight into the evening 'do. They had hired a band who were AMAZING, and they had a photobooth which was equally brilliant! There were props to wear and each session printed a set of four photos, and two copies - one for you to keep, and another to stick in a wedding book for the bride and groom. We had so much fun!

 

Sunday was a bit of a write off but Monday we went to our national park with some of DC's family, it was such a sunny and lovely day. We had an ice cream as soon as we got there and then walked up Old John (look it up) and back down, before madly going back up again to meet with DC's auntie who had just arrived.

 

 

Look at that sky! After our long walk we drove to DC's Mum's house for tea and her famous homemade cake - her cake is so amazing you can't ever say no!

 

Dans

My life in pictures #10

I have exciting news that I've been keeping for you... I bought a Fiat 500 on Saturday!!!

And I picked it up today!!!

Ahhh I am IN LOVE.

I passed my driving test on 19 February 2010. I was sooo nervous because I wasn't getting on with my original driving instructor, so I switched instructors only four weeks before my test, also switching from a diesel car to a petrol, which was probably the biggest change.

My little brother, who was 17 at the time (early driving starter) had his original test in January but because of the snow it was postponed... to the same day as mine! He pulled up outside home (with my old driving instructor - cringe) just as I was setting off for my hour lesson before my test. He told me smugly that he had passed with 4 minors, so it put the pressure on a bit!

So I beat him by passing with no minors, of course.

I got my first car the week after, and at the time it was the most expensive thing I had ever bought! It was a lilac T reg KA and cost me about £1200. I LOVED IT. I loved my car and I loved my sudden freedom! But it must have been a bad choice because I did nothing but throw money at it, and in October 2011 just as DC and I decided we were going to start saving for a house, my car failed its MOT and the garage predicted it would cost £700 to fix, but because it was the welding underneath the car that was the problem, the bottom of the car was literally falling apart and I was warned that it wouldn't last another year.

So I tearfully said goodbye to my first beloved car and it was driven off by Dad to the tip. I was so upset, it seemed like the end of the world, but I knew that my money would be better put towards the saving of the house deposit instead of chucking it at a piece of metal.

So I couldn't afford another car until I started to save this January. And it feels like I haven't had one for forever! I was looking forward to going to look for a car on Saturday for so long, but I'm an anxious person so I lost a lot of sleep over the fact I'd probably have to test drive a car, and I was also worried that they would somehow say no I wasn't allowed one - I knew there was no chance I'd fail a credit check but then it kept playing in the back of my mind.

Anyway, come Saturday morning and the sales guy was really nice, they had my chosen colour in stock, the offer that I was after was still on, and I sailed through the test drive (after stalling at the petrol station before I even started). And he told me I could collect it on Wednesday!

So I walked from work to the showroom today and picked up my brand spanking new car and drove it to my parents house. They loved it too and DC met me there. It was such a lovely drive from the showroom to their house; I was so apprehensive about the drive but it was a dream.

I've taken it to the shopping centre to get some mats and then drove it round a few times to get used to it. I also let DC drive it, how lucky was he!

I have been driving DC's car since the end of January, so I have been used to driving again but I was always worried about driving his Astra because it seemed so big compared to my little KA. But this car is lovely and I'm so glad I've got one again to call my own!

Dans

My life in pictures #9

 

There's not many people who I've kept in touch with since school, but these girls have been my closest friends all of the way through. We've shared so many good times - my first illegal night on the town pre-18, my first legal night on the town, my first girls holiday, countless trips up and down the country, and now that we're all older and settled, a regular catch up for pizza and wine. I don't know what I'd do without them!

 

Dans

My life in pictures #8

 

This is my favourite ever photo of my bestie J and I. I remember the day so clearly, it was my birthday BBQ, five days after my 22nd birthday, having it late due to DC being in New York on Camp America. I had opened this necklace from his literally the hour before this photo was taken.  For my actual birthday it chucked it down all day, when J and I went to Nottingham and I bought this navy Topshop lace playsuit I'm wearing, but this day on 30 August it was sunny and bliss.

 

DC always jokes that he thinks the term 'best friend' is ridiculous and babyish, but what does he know, every girl has a bestie right?

 

J and I met around 5/6 years ago through a mutual friend and we've been inseparable ever since. We are so similar - same thoughts, similar homebird personality, same taste in clothes and jewellery. I tell her absolutely everything and she doesn't judge me. I screen her calls (I just hate talking on a phone) and she doesn't judge me. I call her up after a fight with DC and she doesn't judge me (or him). She is actually the best.

 

We've been on two summer holidays, countless trips away, and more than several trips to the pub for a bottle of pink. J is the best!

 

Dans

My life in pictures #7

On Wednesday my parents celebrated their silver wedding anniversary. 25 years!!!! What a great achievement and we celebrated with a lovely pub dinner before a big cake back at my house.

And here's a (very blurry - sorry!) picture of them on 9 April 1987, how young do they look!

Happy anniversary Ma & Pa!

Dans

My life in pictures #6

Whilst sorting through all of my old paperwork over the Bank Holiday, I came across this adorable kiddie photos that I thought would be perfect for today's post. I love looking at old photos, especially to see the late '80s / early '90s fashion that we were all rocking at the time!

 

Apparently I still make this face now...! I can remember this dress, it was one of my favourites.

 

How adorable are these Christmas day photos? I remember my brother being obsessed with his new punching bag! He looks so cheeky and my Grandad looks so young! I can't wait to show him at the weekend.

 

This is my favourite photo! Must have been taken at the end of 1988, I think I must have been pretty much a newborn. If you look closely you can see my sister rocking my mum's "Deidre Barlow" glasses. Nice hair cut mum!

 

 

 My brother was such a cutie-pie... what happened!

I don't think mum listened about purple and green never to be seen! I love how I'm nicely blending into both the wrapping paper and carpet in the second photo. 

 

I loved rediscovering these old gems!

 

Dans

My life in pictures #5

This is me & DC

 

Our first date was 27 November 2008 after his sister who I worked with set us up... I can't believe it was that long ago! She said he used to come home from nights out and drunkenly tell her that he liked me after seeing me out - something that he has always strenuously denied!

 

I was still at uni when we met and we've been through lots of great times together, one of the greatest being buying our first house together in 2009. He is the best - just don't tell him I said that!

My life in pictures #4

On July 2010, I graduated from De Montfort University in Leicester with a 2:1 in Journalism and English Literature.

I look so happy and young here! My graduation day was great and a bit emotional as everyone realised it was probably the last time a lot of people would see each other.

When I was younger I wanted to be a care worker. I studied health and social care throughout school and college, doing work experience in care homes looking after the elderly. I liked it, but I guess I still didn't really know what I wanted to do, and perhaps care work wasn't for me. As my Mum nicely put - "do you think you're strong enough to be care worker?" as I'm quite emotional and sensitive.

Through school and college I loved to write, but always saw it as a hobby. I kept a diary religiously every day, wrote countless poems, and wrote 11 novels (some which I cringe when looking back on but others that I hold a real love in my heart for - I'm hoping to start revising them some day soon). So I thought, what the hell, if I'm going to pay £3,000 a year then I'd may as well do it on something I am more passionate about than care work, and so enrolled on a Journalism and English Lit degree.

I LOVED IT. I just didn't know it at the time. I preferred the Journalism part of it and got quite good scores in some of my work. I realise now that I loved all the books I read, but probably more so now that I can read them again for fun, rather than dissecting them line for line and trying to find the meaning of everything - how do I know what Shakespeare was thinking when he wrote Hamlet??

So my life was set. I wanted to be a journalist. I did work experience on my local paper and loved it. And when I graduated, I took a trip to London taking advantage of DC's aunt's flat in Crouch End and did a fortnight at more! magazine, and a fortnight at Reveal. Spending my 21st birthday in London by myself making magazine employees tea from a laminated sheet detailing everyone's preferences was quite strange, but made better when DC and my family took a trip down for the day and surprised me. My Mum actually got in touch with the Editor at more! and planned it all between them - she is so jammy.

But after I came home and returned to waitressing, no matter how many CVs I revised and covering notes I wrote, I just wasn't getting anywhere. I tried and tried and tried, and had a list of contacts in a notebook as long as my arm, but it just wasn't happening. Competition was too fierce and I just couldn't get through the door. Then in the November after my graduation I got a job on Reception at my current place of work, and the rest is history.

I still love Journalism. I still love English and reading books. I kind of lost the time and will to write, and also abandoned by blog mid 2010 and haven't really got back into it, but if the option was there then I would absolutely jump at the chance.

Uni was a great time in my life but I am one of those who fall into the group of wishing I made more of it. Well, I can't say I didn't have fun - I moved out of home in my third year, pasta seemed to be quite high in the menu for evening dinner, I dumped my boyfriend of two years for the man of my dreams who subsequently broke my heart, and stayed up all through the night on black coffee (couldn't afford milk) every time an essay was due - and I lived for all of that. I had my first taste of independence, I found out who I really was, I started to realise that actually I don't give a crap what other people think of me, my hair or my dress sense, and it was at uni that I started to LIVE.

Sometimes I forget the carefree person I was back then. Even writing this blog post about London and journalism and black coffee and essay deadlines has made my heart leap a little. It's such a nostalgic feeling of happiness and of having absolutely no responsibility other than getting down to the pound party before the offers end. I am still that person - just with a lot more responsibility!

Dans

My life in pictures #3

On 13 July 2012, DC and I received the keys for our very first home. Our dream home. Yay! This seems fitting for today's post as I can't quite believe it was 8 months ago today that we were stood outside our new house in a brand new village waiting for the previous owners to move out of the house that was legally ours. It was a GREAT feeling.

We didn't dare to view this house for a long time because I knew I'd fall in love with it, and it was too expensive. But we had been saving hard for 7 months by this point and had spent about a month looking at houses with no luck, so we were starting to get a bit fed up (living on £20/week made me into a biatch).

We finally went to view it, fell in love with it, and put in a cheeky offer of £15k less than the inflated asking price (they were asking A LOT compared to neighbouring houses). It took so much wrangling and negotiating until they finally accepted our offer, £11k short of the asking price.

After our offer was accepted, it only actually took 7 weeks for the house to go through. It went so fast and then all of a sudden it was ours!

We soon realised that it is only after you've moved into a house that you really see all of the work that actually needs doing. For a start, the house was FILTHY. It didn't look so much from a distance, but we had to use a tonne of bleach on the shower and the kitchen to get it all gleaming.

We didn't have an awful lot of money to spend on the house, after spending so much on the deposit and fees that mounted up by the time of completion. I think we had about £3k. We started by getting the artex ceilings in every room plastered over, and then we bought some new flooring to go down in the lounge which was much smarter looking.

 

It gave my Dad and DC some bonding time too! It was funny that they were really struggling to lay the floor down properly and had to keep pulling it back up again... THEN they read the instructions and found out how to lay it properly, and it went down in minutes. Men....

When we began to paint, we started to get a picture of how our lounge would end up looking. As soon as the paint was on, all of those midnight finishes before driving back home and getting up at 6 for work seemed worth it (we left it two weeks after the keys to move in).

For some reason, it looked as though our owners had a soft spot for lime green...

 

And this was the first to go!

We decided that our master bedroom would be the one the old owner's child had before. This is what we had to contend with...

Nightmare! It took two coats of white base paint to cover the colour, plus two coats of our Earl Grey to make it look respectable.

But we were more than happy once it was finished.

We ordered laminate flooring for the downstairs bathroom and kitchen, and the place went bust. ANOTHER NIGHTMARE. But once again, once it was down we were really happy.

When DC told me that he wanted a dining table that had benches, I was unimpressed. But there had been a few ideas that DC had proposed - changing the lounge flooring for one - that I wasn't keen on in the beginning but they were some of the best decisions we ever made. So we bought this Argos dining table and benches, which was luckily half price at the time at £150 - bargain! - and kept it in our garage until it was ready to come out.

Again, DC wins because once it was up I LOVED it.

We knew that the sofas were going to take six weeks to arrive and we made do with an old sofa until then. When they finally came they looked AMAZING. I suppose you can never tell how they're going to look in your lounge and we were keeping everything crossed that they would match our colour scheme.

Obviously all of this was hard work for DC!

Then it was time for decorations, to make it finally feel like a home.

 

The only thing the lounge is missing now are some shelves that we'd like above the TV, and some blinds in our bay window. It's taken a long time to get the lounge completed; you don't realise how expensive lamps and curtains and candles are! But now we're finally ready to move onto a new room and get our bedroom looking the way we want it.

We painted our small spare bedroom the the other day, and now it looks fab with my gorgeous dressing table that DC surprised me with for my birthday in August.

We've worked so hard for the past eight months to make our house into a home but we really couldn't have done it without all of our friends and family who have come around and painted, DIY'd, and treated us to things that we couldn't afford - we wouldn't have had the oven, washing machine or fire if it wasn't for our parents!

It's still a work in progress but I'm so proud to say that I've bought my own house and I love the feeling of coming home to it every evening, to the peace and quiet, knowing that it is YOURS and you don't have to let anyone in if you don't want to! You can just ignore the door and phone - it's brilliant!

One thing is for certain though, I'm hoping DC does not want to move house for another 40 years because I'm not going through this all again in a hurry!

Dans

My life in pictures #2

This is me in October 2012, taking part in the Whizz-Kidz Neon Nightwalk with 20 of my colleagues from both our Head Office and one of our branches. The challenge was to walk 10 miles through the night through the streets of London to raise money for children in need of electric wheelchairs and other mobility equipment, taking in the wonderful sights along the way.

 

All together through corporate and personal sponsorship, we raised over £6k, putting that towards the amazing fundraising total of £18,576 that our company managed to raise for Whizz-Kidz throughout 2012.

 

We started the walk at 7pm with over 100 other people and it was hard to keep all of our ladies motivated for the whole 10 miles, especially with the hustle and bustle going on all around us! We finally got to the Mall at 11.50pm just 10 minutes before our coach was meant to leave from Victoria station, and so unfortunately we missed out on the last five minutes of the walk (and missed out on enjoying the cupcakes and welcome celebrations back at Whizz-Kidz HQ!) but it was such a great feat to achieve - and I think we had actually completed 10 miles if you add on the accidental diversions when we got slightly lost along the route!

 

Whizz-Kidz is a charity that is all about giving disabled children the chance to lead a more independent life. They estimate that over 70,000 children at any one time are in need or on the waiting list for electric wheelchairs or other mobility equipment that will give them a better quality of life and help them to have what they deserve - the chance to be a kid. They have been our corporate charity partner since May 2011 and we are continuing to support them until the end of 2013. 2011 saw a shaky start for fundraising, as our company was not used to having a charity partner and this was all new to us so ideas were slow off the ground. But as Charity Co-ordinator I was so happy to achieve such an amazing amount last year. We had branch golf days, colleagues taking part in brilliant runs such as the Edinburgh half marathon and the Great North run, plus an event I organised a Back to the Floor Directors' Challenge, where branches put together a fundraising plan to bid for a Director to work at their branch for the day, doing whatever the branch decides they should do - whether that is making tea, sweeping the warehouse, answering the phone and more!

 

At our annual conference in January I invited a Whizz-Kidz ambassador to join us and give a presentation to show us first hand how Whizz-Kidz has helped his life and many others throughout the UK. It was safe to say that I have never seen so many grown men with a tear in their eye!

 

Whizz-Kidz really is an excellent charity and I can't wait for our branches to get into the flow of coming up with bigger and better ideas to raise even more money this year. I am hoping to somehow incorporate my new found love of running into a fundraising challenge, so any ideas you may have would be much appreciated!

 

Dans



My life in pictures #1

My Dad with the Oscar he and his company won this year for Best Technical Support to the Film Industry!