Sunset garden & cats

Sunset garden & cats, a set on Flickr.

I've had a good day today planning some training for Monday and a meeting in London which lead to a new contract for me. I'll tell you more about that soon.

This evening I had some time to take photos in the garden (and one of Lumpy indoors.) the sun was just setting behind the fence but there were a few rays hitting the plants along the far fence.

I'm still trying different settings with the camera and still getting used to things. The light wasn't great so they aren't the sharpest photos but I'm enjoying my new camera :-)

Some photos

I had such a lovely birthday on Wednesday and I'd had such a lovely time in Doncaster with my parents, Lorraine and Ollie the dog that I was totally exhausted yesterday! We went shopping in the morning but I spent the rest of the day reading magazines and Private Eye and then watching the DVD of Contagion (which is a very good film.)

I did take some photos of the cats, mainly Kasumi as she loves having her photo taken. As soon as she sees the camera she starts rolling around and purring! She is a right diva though. Lumpy slinks off if I try to photograph him like a moody teenager. I did get one of them play fighting.

We were watching Animal Park yesterday and the lions at Longleet were playing just like our cats.

I also took a photo of the moon last night with my zoom lens - I'm quite impressed with how it came out.

Birthday blog

It's my birthday today and last week it was 4 years since I started this blog!

I've had an excellent day. I've had some fabulous gifts. Jase bought me a Nikon 1 V1 camera. He gave the camera to me on Friday so I could use it while away in Doncaster for the weekend. I'm having fun learning all the settings and taking lots of photos.

Today we went into London for lunch at one of our favourite Japanese restaurants, Taro. After that we went to the theatre to see the matinee of the Ladykillers, which was superb, very funny. We then went to have dinner at Gaucho's; steak of course but also lovely cocktails. All in all a really lovely day.

I've included two photos I took in my parents garden in Doncaster earlier in the week.

catch up

As I've not been blogging much I've got quite a lot of catching up to do!

Firstly I am beginning to feel better now, the medication seems to be working and my side effects are changing and getting less intrusive.

I've been trying to spring clean over the last week. I started on the kitchen sorting through cupboards as well as general tidying and cleaning. As you'll see from the photo below Kasumi decided to "help" me, although her help seemed to involve trying to break into her food bag!

We've had fantastic weather over the last week, really hot and sunny for the end of March. It feels very unnatural and although I appreciate the warmth and sun it does feel a bit unsettling. I'm sure it's climate change. Any way the warm weather has woken my tulips early with one of the salmon pink tulips flowering today!
Here it is from another angle.
I had a wonderful weekend, on Saturday I went down to London to meet my twitter friend, Sarah aka @gentlechaos It was the first time we'd managed to meet up and I had a lovely time. Sarah is really easy to talk to and I can talk for Britain. We certainly didn't run out of things to talk about. We had a lovely lunch at Canteen on Baker Street. Below you can see the victoria sponge I had for pudding.
After lunch we walked up to Regents Park, the weather was glorious and after looking around some of the park we sat on the grass in the sunshine. All in all a lovely day.

The Black Dog

I have to apologise once again for not blogging. The black dog (depression) has been scratching at my door for a little while now. As ever it was only when my ability to actually work was affected that I realised how bad it was.
But at least I did recognise it and I went back to my GP to go back on the antidepressants again.

The black dog is what Winston Churchill called his bouts of depression
and I think it's an apt description. Dogs can be scary but they're also loyal and for me my depression is not as frightening as it used to be and it does keep coming back like a faithful dog. I do believe that I can train my black dog so it becomes less of a problem.

I was really touched and grateful for the support and kind words of my friends on Facebook and Twitter. I was also surprised at how many had experience of mental health conditions whether it was post natal depression or something more like my anxiety and depression cycle. It cheers me to see how the stigma of mental health conditions is being slowly eroded. I know there are many barriers to over come but I know that 10 years ago I didn't dare talk about my mental health condition openly.

I've had nearly 2 weeks of side effects from the medication: nausea, dizziness, head ache & hot flushes but they're easing slowly. I'm also beginning to feel a bit more positive being able to start spring cleaning & gardening.

I love my garden and today I had a Japanese honeysuckle and two climbing white roses delivered. One of the roses was featured on Gardener's World on Friday, I was so glad I ordered it before the programme I bet it's sold out now! I'll post some pictures and links about my garden later this week.

Garden and cats

Garden and cats, a set on Flickr.

I took some photos of the cats in the garden yesterday enjoying the sunshine. I was digging the border ready to plant some roses & a blackberry bush. The cats were fascinated by me digging as well as enjoying themselves chasing bees!

Have your say!

As I promised in the previous entry here is the link to Disability Rights UK's 2 surveys in response to the cross Government consultation on disability issues. Please if you have the time look at my blog entry below and the information on the link above. Then any disabled person is welcome to complete the general survey whilst those with experience of leaving school or studying post 16 in the last 5 years, please complete our post 16 education survey as well!

Thank you for your time! As we disability activists used to say back in the day - Nothing about us without us!

Have your say on how to improve post 16 education for disabled people

At the moment I'm working for Disability Rights UK for a couple of days a week on education policy work. It's really interesting work and at the moment I'm looking for disabled students or any disabled people with recent experience of:

• leaving school,
• going to college or university
• or leaving education to find work,

to help us respond to a Government consultation. All you need to do if you have recent experience of the above areas is to complete a short survey. (The link and more information is below.)

The Government consultation

As you may know, the Office of Disability Issues recently launched for the Government a consultation into a cross government disability strategy. You can find out more about it here: http://odi.dwp.gov.uk/odi-projects/fulfilling-potential.php

The Government want their disability strategy to address all areas of disabled people’s lives like education, work, independent living, leisure and all of life’s events. The consultation particularly focuses on the ambitions of disabled people and how to make these ambitions a reality,

We need your help

At Disability Rights UK we want to respond to the Government by drawing on the experiences and ideas of disabled people. Disability Rights UK will be launching a general survey which covers the broader areas of the consultation but we in the education team want to find out about disabled people's recent experiences and opinions around leaving school, attending college or university and leaving education to find work. We need you to tell us how post 16 education can be improved for disabled people.

The survey

If you have been in education whether full time or part time in the last 5 years we would really love to hear from you. We have developed a very short survey which covers the key areas listed above and asks for your experiences of education and also your ideas of how things can be improved for disabled people in education after leaving school.

We can not have a credible voice or fight for change with out your support. Please if you can give up 10 minutes of your time to complete our survey you will be helping us greatly. Here is the link:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/disabilityrightsukpost16ed

The survey closes on Wednesday 22^nd of February

Please pass this information on to any friends that you think may also be able to complete the survey for us, they don’t have to have worked with Disability Rights UK in the past.

Thank you for your support, please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any further questions or want more information.

As soon as the general and post 16 education survey is up on the Disability Rights UK website I'll post that link too but I wanted to spread the word now about our part of the survey!

East Anglia

East Anglia, a set on Flickr.

Photos from last weekend. I'll blog properly about it soon!