Making up for it!

Well a weekend of no blogs so I thought I'd make up for it tonight! Friday night and I, (eventually,) managed to get out of school and head down south to London for the weekend. Saturday saw me at the seaside! Well, where else will you see a seagull visiting the bird table?!
A great day with some lovely weather and a good weekend generally. I returned this afternoon to get jobs done and even managed to spend a short while in the railway shed.

Speaking of which, my father has completed a pair of railway workers cottages and I spent some time at the weekend building and painting a playground scene which now adorns the corner of the village green,

....as well as the cricket figures for a match of crisket which now takes place on the green.

My father has developed an amazing little diarama involving the post office and another corner shop. You will notice the people having a good old natter on the pavement whilst a pair of cheeky children have opened the window to reach out for a cat on the roof. The local policeman seems oblivious to the danger as he watches the passing traffic from underneath the street lamp

One of the railway workers cottages with the front garden developing slowly!

The back of the other railway workers cottage. Clearly water saving is important as the butt collects rain from the outhouse. A corner patch in the garden is being developed as a flower bed and has recently been dug over.

Eric came up to visit me as I was working and I mentioned to him that I needed a small vacuum with a pipe to suck up bits of scatter and flocking that have strayed into 'un glued' areas. Shortly after, he arrived at the shed with this little beauty...

Someone was throwing it out and it was down by the dustbins in the marina. A huge thanks to whoever it was but it has gone to a very good home!

One thing we did do at the weekend was plan all the walks that we want to do in the May half term, (only a few weeks time!) This year, my father and I are heading up to the Yorkshire Dales again as it's one of my favourate areas. The farm that we camped on last time we visited the area in 2006 have a static caravan for rent and so we are using that this year to save having to tow our own caravan. It means we should have a nicer and warmer place to stay with rooms, decent heating etc.

I use Memory Map software to plan my walks. An awesome bit of kit that runs on my laptop for planning and then I create and print off a route card as well as send the overlay of the route to my handeld Pocket PC. When using this for the walk, it is very simple to use and shows a little compass to tell me which direction to walk in! It was a life saver, (possible literally,) up Kinder Scout when the mist rolled in - we even helped to get a bunch of very lost D of E treckers off the top!