The long silence on the blog has been partly due to me working on a top secret project. It was Robbie’s birthday yesterday and I wanted to do something special and totally unique for him, so as well as buying him several presents I made him a couple of wooden items too. Robbie is passionate about pens and pencils so it seemed like a good idea to make him a pencil box and pencil holder. The pencil holder is shaped like a pencil and I have decorated it in a fair approximation of the Cross Country Trains colours, the pencil box was much more sober and sensible! I made up for the sober and sensible with a rather naught set of nesting dolls which I am certainly not going to display on the blog – but they brought a smile to Robbie’s face! It took a lot of work but I was very pleased with the way they turned out – I am going to make him a railway related set next.
Robbie got lots of other presents including his favourite aftershave, an external hard drive, a rather special tin of Starbucks coffee, a coin purse and an alarm clock and radio in the shape of Lego bricks. So, he is another year older but I wonder if this birthday has made him any wiser!
Yesterday we made an early start. First there was the challenge of packing all of Emily's belongings in the car, we got it all in somehow (and we only forgot a couple of minor things). The journey to Leicester was relatively uneventful despite the inadequacy of the directions provided on the internet by one of the big motoring companies. It would be fair to 
say that we arrived at our destination in spite of the directions rather than because of them!
Emily's flat is lovely - I would happily have stayed there in her place! She has her own room with en-suite bathroom and she shares a really nice kitchen with 3 others. The accommodation is fairly new, it very well designed and it is in a nice area. She will have to travel by bus to the 
university campus, but she can buy a bus pass so it should work out well. Unloading the car proved a bit of a challenge and it put Robbie in a bad mood, but we got it all done and we left Emily surrounded by crates and packing cases with hours of unpacking ahead of her.
I expect she will be back as soon as she has a big enough load of washing, 
but it felt very odd to know that she wouldn't be at home full time anymore. I left her with a little box of things to remind her of home and I indulged my scrapbooking skills to make her a little tag style scrapbook with a few photos of friends and family inside. It always takes longer than I plan to make scrapbook layouts, but I was quite pleased with the finished result.
Yesterday we made an early start. First there was the challenge of packing all of Emily's belongings in the car, we got it all in somehow (and we only forgot a couple of minor things). The journey to Leicester was relatively uneventful despite the inadequacy of the directions provided on the internet by one of the big motoring companies. It would be fair to 
say that we arrived at our destination in spite of the directions rather than because of them!
university campus, but she can buy a bus pass so it should work out well. Unloading the car proved a bit of a challenge and it put Robbie in a bad mood, but we got it all done and we left Emily surrounded by crates and packing cases with hours of unpacking ahead of her.
but it felt very odd to know that she wouldn't be at home full time anymore. I left her with a little box of things to remind her of home and I indulged my scrapbooking skills to make her a little tag style scrapbook with a few photos of friends and family inside. It always takes longer than I plan to make scrapbook layouts, but I was quite pleased with the finished result.
