Friday 30 December 2011

Christmas 2011 Part 1 - The Proposal

So I realise that I still didn't post about when N left for Baltimore. Well, it looked something like this:


But seven weeks later, on 15th December, he came back again! YAYS! :D

And two days later, my finger was adorned with significantly more bling than before... :D Looky!


Yeah, yeah, alright, alright, I hear ya, you wanna hear the whole story right? Well it goes a little something like this...

Obviously we knew N was coming back to Europe for Christmas, and so we arranged to have a day out while he was back, just the two of us, for some qualidee time, to catch up. N said he would like to see the sea, so (bearing in mind I had ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what N had up his sleeve) I suggested we go for a nice longish walk up to the top of Golden Cap, which was something I'd been wanting to do for a while. It is apparently the highest point on the south coast, and I spent many a lesson staring at its peak from the classroom window, never knowing that such a significant moment in my life would occur there! Imagine what 14 year-old me would say if you went up to her and said "Ten years from now the love of your life is going to propose to you up there!"

The view of Golden Cap from Stonebarrow car park

I drove us up to the car park, and expecting mud and chilly winds rather than diamonds, donned my filthy wellies and naff fleece before we headed up to the top. It was just as lovely as I expected, with views like this towards Seatown and Weymouth:


And views like this back towards Lyme:

Blissfully unaware of the imminent life-changing event, in my wellies


After a few minutes, which included more than a few failed stretchy-outty photos, I declared myself cold (I rather sensibly removed a layer on the way up when I got too warm, obviously not expecting to be forced to spend more time at the top than was absolutely necessary) and suggested to made our way back down. But N said casually, "I just want to walk over there a bit" so I dutifully followed him over there a bit. It all becomes a bit hazy after this... So, suffice to say, N asked me to marry him, and through my shock and cold I managed to pull myself together enough to say yes! And here's me wearing the ring to prove it:


Of course being totally cool we went for afternoon tea afterwards rather than cracking open the champagne, although I was forced to have a sip of champagne later on, and it was not pretty.



I get to marry this guy! :D

So, to summarise, WE'RE ENGAGED!!! :D :D :D

Sunday 20 November 2011

Leaving Cardiff after 6 Years...

So on Monday 10th October the time finally came to leave Cardiff, 6 years and 2 weeks after first arriving as a scared 18 year old fresher. It was pretty sad, or at least it would've been if I hadn't been so worried about making the house spotless, and whether all of our stuff would fit in the van we hired... Which is also the reason there are no photos, blogging was the last thing on my mind! You will, however, find a smattering of photos of the mess I made of my parents' house once we arrived...

My sister's room the day after our arrival. I'm so glad she's visited since to see it's not in this state now!

I carried on working in the lab almost right up until the last minute, including spending a whole day cataloguing all the material I was leaving behind in freezers and cupboards: DNA, seeds, protein, plants, cultures, etc, etc, etc.

My desk - not much thesis writing happening there...

N had a huge leaving party with loads of his colleagues, so many people turned up, it was all very touching + showed how missed he'll be there. I didn't feel the need for a party, I'm only 100 miles away, I'll be back there seeing my supervisors for a meeting and my friends for lemony Christmas fun in a couple of weeks already anyway! I'll save the partying for when there's a "Dr." in front of my name and a "PhD" at the end!

More stuff. You may be surprised by the big empty space, but that's where the bed goes...

We spent a looonngggg time packing and cleaning. I was ruthless, I've never chucked out/recycled/donated so much stuff in my life! We even took a couple of trips to the dump, that was fun! But I had so much useless junk! Who needs so many old invoices? Guiding information that went out of date 5 years ago?! Insane! We also spent a 12 hour day the day before we moved out, with both of us cleaning absolutely everything, the whole house from top to bottom. It was spotless. And yet the landlady has still managed to find some reason to hold back a princely proportion of our bond... Sigh.

This is actually no where near the worst mess I made of the hallway, at one point I managed to fill the whole thing with stuff!

Anyway, despite all the ruthlessness (and a trip from a very lovely friend of mine who took a load) there was still a lot of stuff filling our living room (really wish I'd taken a photo of that!), including two bikes, so I was pretty scared to see the van when it arrived. It was pretty small, but we actually fit everything in easily, phew! (Thanks again for driving Col!) What I hadn't considered was how challenging it was going to be to fit everything from our 3-bed house into my parents' already full 3-bed... But I managed to fit it all in neatly after 2.5 days of sorting and tidying (and thank God for having access to a stable and my mum's old studio!).  I should take some "after" photos to show how I managed to pack it all in!

N stayed for 2.5 weeks before jetting off to the USofA, which I will talk about soon...

Sunday 13 November 2011

Visa la vida

On a remarkably hot day at the end of September N and I took a trip to London town for the interview to get his visa at the American Embassy.


You're not allowed to take anything in with you except for your documents (and I think your wallet is OK), and N didn't fancy going all the way to London and back without a phone, which is understandable, so I went along for the ride and looked after his stuff while he was there.

So I had several hours to kill, alone, in London. As I mentioned, it was extremely hot for the end of September, so rather than spending my time underground on the, well, on the Underground, I took a walk across central London.  I ended up in Green Park: it was lovely to find such a green space after all the hot streets.


And found Buckingham Palace, where something was going on, I never did find out what!


I fought my way through the crowds and finally reached my goal: Girlguiding HQ! As well as all the offices of the staff there is a shop there and also, happily, a member's lounge where I could get free tea (well for a donation) and where I could set myself up and get some work done. And avoid the horror of London (I guess I didn't mention yet that I really don't like the place!)


At GGUK there were badges on the walls, including the one below. I'll be living near there soon!


A few hours later N called from a payphone - he waited all that time and only had to have answer a couple of simple questions before his visa was approved - only took a couple of minutes! So anyway, I raced back across town from Victoria to Oxford Circus (this time I did take the tube) to meet him outside the embassy, then we went off in search of fooooddd. We found this lovely place, I think it was Italian, serving the most fantastic paninis. From what I can remember we shared a mozarella, sundried tomato and basil; and a mozarella, tomato and avocado, both of which were incredible:


After lunch we headed back to the underground and made our way to South Kensington to go the Natural History Museum. Neither of us had been before and we were keen to see dinosaurs and things :D And we got to meet Darwin:


Awesome!


The whale room was pretty impressive, although I think I still can't get my head around how big whales are!


Overall I was pretty underwhelmed to be honest, but I did get hugely excited when I saw Mary Anning's icthyosaur and other fossils on the walls. I also really loved the panels on the ceiling. And I found some lemons! (I know several people who will appreciate this, maybe one day I will explain why...)



We enjoyed afternoon tea in the museum then headed back to Paddington to find some dinner before our train home. It was a long day, but worth it for the visa (N's been over there for over two weeks now , more on that soon) and to spend the extra time perusing the museum. It was also just nice to actually spend some time together amidst working so hard on our PhDs for so long!


In other news, as I say, N is now in Baltimore, working hard, and has found an apartment. I'm on the farm in Dorset, also working hard - I sent my first draft of my first results chapter off to my supervisors for their constructive criticism last Monday, scary stuff! And I'm aiming to send them another first draft, of my second results chapter, on Tuesday. So I've mostly been doing that, and walking the dog. And I've started helping out again at my old Guide unit, which is surreal, but fun! Gives me something to look forward to on a Wednesday. And today I made the Christmas cake! So the house smells really Christmassy now, I think I'm getting into the Christmas spirit already, sorry if that offends anyone! But Christmas this year holds a lot for me to look forward to :)

Next blog will probably be about moving, which was already a month ago!

Friday 28 October 2011

Summer Fun

Argh I've been meaning to post this for sooooo long! Life (and the slowness of Blogger) got the better of me! I could probably post an Autumn fun blog soon! But let's get this out of the way first...

Sometime in September...
OK, so this post is an amalgam of all I've wanted to say over the past month, but what no-one told me was that there aren't enough hours in the day for blogging! Please bear with me, I have a PhD to finish, don'tcha know! :P Oh, and also this post has nothing to do with the move (I think), I just wanted to share the awesome time we had over the past few weekends :) Which were very welcome in between the stresses of trying to finish in the lab, which I won't even talk about!

Medieval Melee

For N's birthday we decided to check out the Medieval festival in the grounds of Cardiff castle. Yes, it was mostly for children/families, but we still had fun watching the trebuchet demonstration:


Seeing a guy enthusing over his medieval weaponry:


And watching some falconry:




Among other things, which included my first visit inside the Castle apartments in the 6 years I've lived here, and likewise a walk around the walls, plus eating hog roast and buying mead (both for N, not for me!)

Then we went home to bake birthday cake! Hazelnut mocha to be precise:


Tasty, but did absolutely nothing to satisfy my craving for coffee cake!

Green Man Festival


View of the main stage

Oh. My. Word. The Green Man Festival is easily the best festival ever! (OK, so it's only my second festival experience, but still)

The Green Man himself / I can hula-hoop / Laura J Martin flauting!

I had such a lovely weekend, the setting was gorgeous, nestled in the Brecon Beacons, the weather was fantastic, the people were all lovely (and there weren't too many of them!) and the atmosphere was just so relaxed. I just let it all wash over me. And that's without even mentioning the music! Laura Marling, Fleet Foxes, Benjamin Francis Leftwich, Ben Howard and the Gentle Good, plus some new discoveries: Laura J Martin and Bleedin' Noses (awful name, great sound). See here for my Spotify playlist of all my favourites from the weekend.

The moon came out behind Fleet Foxes

Oh my word, I almost forgot! We saw Tim Minchin! He played the Thursday night before the festival officially started, and he was incredible! Completely hilarious! Although the audience participation version of Hallelujah that he led nearly made me cry! If you've never heard of him before, go and look him up on YouTube. N and I particularly liked his song "Predjudice"

And of course it was great to spend some quality time with family :)

Sis and Daddy
And we ate some great food: soup, pasta, nachos, stir fry, wraps (enjoyed in a very dignified manner, as seen below), lots of tea, and several crumpets from the strumpets (incredible! :D)

Me + sis enjoy yums :D
And also got a little wet in between the lengthy sunny spells, but that was fine, it was only one day, and the whole thing was too awesome for us to care!


So the moral of the story being: go to Green Man festival! But not too many of you because then it would be too busy and would spoil the charm :P

Bank Holiday Weekend

Anybody reading this who knows me well will know that this wasn't the easiest weekend for my family, anybody who doesn't, well maybe I'll go into it one day, but not now. But despite that, we still managed to have some pleasant times in the area around home.

For instance, I spent a lovely afternoon wandering around the house and gardens of Forde Abbey with my sister:


 Where I got a bit snap happy, and she played with water snails:


And we saw the highest powered fountain in England:


Which incidentally I saw again today (October 28th, a beautiful autumn day, I could have stayed out all day it was so warm) but from a distance, from the top of a hill near our house :)

Talking of hills, the following day was lovely and sunny and saw us walk to the top of Pilsdon Pen to see the sea:


Pretty awesome right?!

I also wanted to post a picture of my sister, step-dad and I, but it's not too flattering, and I don't think I'd ever be forgiven if I did!

So, stayed tuned for updates on a trip to London for N's visa, moving, and N leaving for America coming soon!

Sunday 18 September 2011

Hey look, a new post!

Hi there friends! So I've been trying to write you all a long post, with pictures, about all the fun things I got up to this August, but blogger has been slow and delayed me every time I've tried, which in fairness is very few times, because lab times are tough at the moment: only 3 weeks to go until I leave Cardiff!

So in the meantime, while I'm trying to finish said fun post, here is a post about this:


N and I went to the official presentation of my Queen's Guide Award on Friday, which was super exciting! It's the highest award you can obtain in Guiding in the UK, and I finally finished in January, after four years and three months of hard work and setbacks (to any Guidey types reading, this does include a 12 month break and a 3 month extension for personal reasons, I did actually finish it within the 3 years), so it was really special to finally get the actual award.

It was presented by this lady:


The new Chief Guide, Gill Slocombe! I was overly excited by this (can you tell by the crazy look in my eyes?) The best thing of all is that she is soooooo super lovely! We had a nice long chat with her afterwards and she is so genuine and obviously cares about the future of the organisation >> happy Gem :D


So look out for tales of summer fun soon, and I guess more Baltimore news at some point (although there's really not as much to tell as I thought there might be!)

Sunday 7 August 2011

Let's start at the very beginning...

...it's a very good place to start!

So, in April 2011 my amazing boyfriend (let's call him "N") had an interview for a job across the pond, in the almighty USofA. In early July we finally found out that he'd got the job and, not being one to turn down a good adventure, I agreed to join him there! N is due to submit his PhD at the end of September and start his job in Baltimore in the middle of October. I'm a bit slow. I'm currently trying to finish my experiments in the lab and after we've moved out of our house in Cardiff I will be heading back to my step-dad's place in Dorset to write my thesis, hopefully by Christmas, with a view to joining N in Baltimore in the new year. Exciting stuff right?!

But also rather terrifying...


Which leads me on to the purpoise purpose (that was a genuine typo, awesome!) of this blog. Firstly, lots of people have been asking me questions about how it's all going, and much as I love telling everyone about our upcoming adventure, it does get tiring telling the same story over and over again. So it's mainly to keep my family, friends and anyone else out there who's interested in the loop. Secondly, trying to finish my PhD, move out of our house and move to another country is taking up rather a lot of room in my head, so I thought it might be helpful to get it out of there and into the real world... So let's see how it goes!

So things you should probably know: I use exclamation marks, A LOT! So please comment and let me know if it's too much. And I will probably end up writing about random stuff other than the move, gotta keep y'all interested y'know (oh my, I'm already turning into an American, eeks!)

Like now...

In other news, we've been eating sushi this evening:


 In our favourite sushi restaurant in Cardiff, Tenkaichi, on City Road. So awesome! I had some stir-fry veggies and lots of nigiri, while N also had ebi katsu (big prawns in breadcrumbs) and vegetable tempura.



We also tried this spider maki:


Weird, but pretty tasty, salty crab!

Sushi is gooooddd :D