Delayed Apologies

So I had an unexpectedly busy month which resulted in me spending a bit of time away from the blog. It started out with the Church holiday club, which was great fun. I was one of the helpers for the 5-6 years age group, and was in charge of a table of five boys, they were great fun, and in many ways more creative than some of the girls. They were loud and talkative for sure, but they joined in all the activities and had fun, one of them even told me that he 'loved it here'. 

Me and my friend's who got engaged having bench time at my dinner party

The day after the holiday club ended my parents went on holiday for a fortnight during which time my boyfriend came to stay. My sister split time between home and her boyfriend's and my brother went to stay with my Nan. On the first weekend my boyfriend and I held a dinner party, something I also did last year, but basically an evening where we all have great fun on the non-alcohols. We served Stuffed Peppers, followed by Pasta with Key Lime Pie and Panna Cotta for dessert. It was my first time making a Panna Cotta and it turned out waaay better than I expected. 

Panna Cotta Dinosaur, not the slice that made me sick :P

The trouble we then had was that we made a lot more than six people can eat, especially on one of the hottest weekends of the year where we'd all lost our appetite's. This resulted in me eating Panna Cotta for the next few days and getting food poisoning. I was pretty much knocked out for the whole of the Wednesday and recovering for much of the Thursday.

My sister LANing it up at i46, you can tell the sort of family we are!

The Friday through Monday of the bank holiday weekend we spent with a group of friends, my sister and her boyfriend at the UK's biggest gaming festival i46. As one of the main features of this event is that it's a massive LAN party and as such has pretty amazing internet speeds I could, in theory, have checked the blog and written a couple of posts, except that you have to take into account we entered the Minecraft creative build competition which is the most time consuming of the competition's and pretty much ate away our entire weekend. We ended up coming third with what I would myself say was an awesome build, an adventure mountain filled with puzzles and games. Last time we competed we came second which was a bit of a disappointment this time but y'know we weren't the judges. The audience highlight for this was that we had not one but two mazes which when the host demolished a bit in an attempt to get out faster he still couldn't, you can see the video footage of this here. Our specific competition doesn't actually make an appearance until 1:11:20 but the rest of the Minecraft Competitions were also pretty fun to watch, trust me I sat through them live, but particularly the Hunger Games Competition. 

The boyfriend and I waiting for the Minecraft finals to start.

This brings me to my next point which is that we spent a total of about 12 hours travelling to and from this event. We travelled by train but had some friends who travelled by car, they took most of my books with them and so when we got to Birmingham New Street with only 2 chapters to go in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, 5 more hours of travel and no other books I succumbed to the purchase of the frankly awesome Hunger Games trilogy. I spent the rest of the week reading these, finishing Catching Fire in it's entirety in one day despite 6 and a half hours at work. I have posts ready to go on these books for the next few weeks.

My parents came home on Saturday and I didn't finish tidying in time resulting in some maternal disapproval as both my Nan's turn 70 this month, one was born literally the day after the other, and one of them had a birthday party yesterday which resulted in family and some of her friends coming back to ours for tea and cake. For this I made a sponge, I make an awesome sponge, but that resulted in yet more work.

My Nan's birthday cake, made by my other Nan, Ironic!

Yesterday evening one of my best friend's came round to tell me that her and her boyfriend of five years or so had gotten engaged on saturday night. I spent the past 24 hours in a state of frantic excitement, perhaps more excited than her as she's still struggling to absorb it. She also gave me some Herman Cake which I'm going to spend the next few days trying to keep alive, wish me luck!

Then I met another of my friend's for lunch to say goodbye as she's going back to Uni on Thursday. One of my other friend's went back Saturday, we said goodbye Friday evening.

It's my brother's 16th birthday tomorrow and my parent's 25th wedding anniversary Wednesday,  and my driving test on Thursday. Wish me luck! All being well I'll be back tomorrow with another post I meant to put up just before all of this happened, but if not rest assured I'm hanging in here and I'll be back to normal scheduling as soon as possible. And I'll try to get round to reading some blogs.

Sorry Guys.

Rowen