A good day today, happily settled in Sycamore Cottage. Very weary from all the moving, but very happy to be here. Thanks to everyone for all the help! It's pretty idylic up here.

A week on Thursday we'll get our keys for our cottage, and by the Sunday we'll have to be out of 16 scholars drive! We're reaching that point now where the un-ticked off moving jobs are getting stressful, and you start to really wonder why it is you're doing this after all! I do love living in Manchester, and although we'll still have it on our doorstep (and will still be coming here fairly often!) it won't quite be the same living 1/2 an hour away.

Still, this is probably the hump of getting everything sorted and we've got a lot to look forward to! I'm looking forward to when we get fully installed, and have the: internet connection, car, stuff moving type details sorted, and I can start properly exploring Chapel's excellent looking food shopping :)

Once we're settled, the main problem will be repressing the cat's desire to escape the cottage and start killing things...

We actually do all our stuff moving on the 4th of May! So the fun really starts there :)

I can't recall ever doing so little with a long Easter bank holiday weekend. And yet.. I'm still exhausted!

I guess that's partly because one of the many things I didn't do was, sleep. And there was quite a lot of Civ V..

The blessing is, at least this is only a four day week.

*Yaaawn*

In case you've not been glued to the rumour-mill.. We're moving house!

We're going from here:



To here:



We'll still be 30 minutes from Manchester, but without all that actually living in the city malarkey. The place is actually called Wash, it's near Chapel-en-le-frith which is somewhere in the hills basically :)

This doesn't quite match our previous plans, but we saw the house, fell in love with it and threw deposit money at it in pretty short order. More news as things progress!

Here's my photo-montage for last year. It was a very memorable year not least for the fact that I married the love of my life, and lost the last of my grandparents. I won't go on because of that whole pictures-better-than-words issue.

Phew. Delivered my "address from the grandchildren" at Lou's funeral. Very glad that I did it (I wouldn't have forgiven myself otherwise), but it was a real weight up until the moment I stopped speaking.

Covered my thoughts on Lou in my previous private post, but I'll say here that her funeral was beautiful. She would have had a fantastic time there, had it not been her own funeral..

She's now buried on top of Don at the church in English Bicknor.

Was lovely to see the forest of Dean again, and kind of sad to think that I don't really now have reasons to go there. Must make a pilgrimage some time to walk the forest paths again. Perhaps when we get a dog :)

Bye bye Lou.

Woke up preternaturally early today. Sleeping patterns all over the place, but generally consists of:

* Skyrim, Skyrim, Skyrim... Wow it's late. Better sleep.
* Sleep...
* Wha? 5AM what's going on? Why am I awake? Oh it's kr0n's bedtime.
* Not much sleep...
* Gah! It's start work time!

So I guess waking up early isn't all bad as it's given me my internet fix. Now I just need to concoct a playlist and I can do something useful... Some kind of incongruous mix of Kingtide, Skatalites, Tool and Wonder Stuff should do the trick!

Now I come to read this, I realise that I could have got some early Skyrim in...

Another fine year. A new venue, but basically the same much-needed downtime!