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

Canterbury Cathedral

This is the final of four posts I've done about my holiday in Kent. To see the others follow the links at the end of the post.

 Canterbury Church is the home of the head of the Church of England. And it's possibly the oldest Christian religious site in England with some form of worship being held there as early as the 3rd Century.

It's a beautiful building filled with amazing medieval architecture and so many wonderful stained glass windows.

There are in places wall paintings, which are very old art, superbly preserved for everyone to see and enjoy.

This candle marks the place of the altar which was laid to commemorate Thomas Beckett, the Archbishop who was murdered in his place of work. When the Reformation came and Henry VIII had a lot of the work torn down the altar was removed, a candle has been burning on the spot pretty much ever since.

Of course there's grafitti, some of it's really old, this one from 1704 was the oldest we could find hence the picture, but there's probably older grafitti which hasn't been dated.

This was my favourite window in the building, and I don't really feel like my picture's done it justice. 

I'm linking up to Tuesday Tips & Pics @ Live.Love.Travel only a day late.


Rowen

Upnor Castle

Please check out this post about our challenge.

This is the third of four posts I'll be doing about places I visited on my holiday this year.

 Upnor Castle is one you might not have heard of. All of the other places that we visited are fairly big on the tourist map, being situated in large towns/cities and having a bit of worldly sway to their names. 

 Upnor Castle however is a little bit harder to get to, right at the top of a hill, not obviously directly on Public Transport routes and with a bit of a walk from the Car Park. Once you get there however it's definitely worth the visit. 

 Upnor Castle was built on the River Medway to protect the Warships of Queen Elizabeth I which were anchored upstream at Chatham. A chain was installed which stretched across the River, during the Spanish Armada, and it could be raised in order to sink ships.

 It was last used for action during the Dutch raid in 1667. From here the British Navy successfully repelled the Dutch invading forces, however it wasn't much after this that it started becoming difficult for ships to travel far up the River and as such Upnor Castle was effectively replaced by a new defensive position closer to the coast.

 In 1668 the Castle was transformed into a Magazine, or a place where gunpowder is stored and tested to make sure it works correctly for the gun it's intended to be used with.

 Upnor Castle is beautiful to look around, and although it's a military position it has more in common architecturally with the French and Italian Chateau's than it does with the Norman Motte's more common on the British Isles.

This is one of the photo's of me I like best. All time.

Have to say that we're very grateful to the lovely American guy who took this for us. Only picture we have together from the whole holiday.

 I love the fact that from almost angle it has fantastic views of the river. Views which were a necessity.

 This is a favourite shot of mine. I love how clear the sailing boats look even through the window.

And the best part? There's the most fantastic pub next door which serves up delicious and traditional British favourites to order at very reasonable prices. A very filling meal for 2 plus drinks came in at under £20!


Linking up to Tuesday Tips & Pics @ Live Love Travel.

I promise I'll be done with these soon.

Rowen

Rochester Cathedral

Please check out this post about our challenge.

This is the second of four posts I'll be doing about places I visited on my holiday this year.

 Rochester Cathedral is one of the oldest churches in Britain. There has been a Church on the site since the 7th Century when Kent was a country in it's own right ruled by King Ethelbert.

 The Cathedral itself wasn't built until the medieval period which is visible if you start to look at the roof, that kind of structure was a typical feature in buildings of the period, both because it looked impressive and because it was the best way they'd found of keeping a large building stable.

 If you walk around the Cathedral today you'll see countless memorials to men who've died in battles for centuries past. The flags in the photo above are ones which were taken into battle by the local regiment during one of the World Wars.

 Throughout the Cathedral there are also spectacular stained glass windows. Each of them features a biblical scene, some more obscure than others!

 In the photo above you can see the main East Window located above the high altar.

 The Cathedral also has a wonderful garden which you can wander around. This dates from the period when the Cathedral was also a Priory, meaning that the priests lived there and they could go to the garden for some quiet time or for private prayer.

Cathedrals are another one of my favourite things to go and visit.

linking up with Tuseday Tips & Pics @ Live.Love.Travel

Rowen