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Sunday 31 March 2013

Anthropologie My Thai Style

 Thailand, one of those countries that I've always wanted to visit but never got the chance.  My husband was lucky enough 12 years ago to get to spend two weeks there as part of a work conference.  My little girl was only three weeks old at the time, so I won staying behind at home and enduring sleepless nights alone, while he enjoyed sun, sand and beautiful beaches.

I'm not a great one for lazing on beaches, (that's what I tell myself anyway) and prefer to explore so packing for me is more practical rather than beach wear.  Something that I can pull on in the morning,that will look good all day without me having to run back to the hotel for numerous changes of clothes.  Something that I can wear wherever the urge or the local bus takes me.  I saw these trousers and thought wow! cool, classy and easy to wear.  Smart enough to take me throughout the day, whether that's walking in the surf, trailing to a monument, trekking through a forest to see elephants or just relaxing at a bar.


I love the white top they have teamed it with, which is cool enough for the hottest of hot Thai days, and will hopefully allow me to get a bit of colour on my arms whilst I walk around. 

If it got too hot, I'd have packed a trusty scarf, like this one...

Which I could throw over my shoulders if necessary.

I'd never be caught out in the sun with these lovely matching sunglasses or classic hat with a twist.




It was a real struggle to pick just one outfit from the catalogue but I felt that for my style to be Thai style; this one is just so me.  I can see this getting lots of wear and also wearing  well.  If you`d like to see more of these lovely clothes then visit www.anthropologie.eu  you wont regret it.www.anthropologie.eu

Friday 29 March 2013

Worst Window View




Oh where do I start with the view from my window. 

I live in what was once a quaint little village, nestled on the edge of the vast wilderness that is Dartmoor, in Devon.  Picture in your mind, chocolate box cottages, windy roads and lanes, horses clip clopping along the streets and the odd primrose and daffodil sneaking out of the hedgerows.

  Well that was then and this is now... my quaint little village has become a commuter village... my lovely little town now has a road going round the outside to try to protect it from traffic and development.  My once lovely view of undulating hills and an old paper mill is now distinctly different from that picture postcard idyll.

 This is the view I used to have...
 
This is my pretty ex-stable now house.
 
and this is the view from the top three windows....






 


I just couldn't believe my luck when my view of a church, stream and pretty trees, became obscured by a indian restaurant/supermarket car park, which was then joined by the delights of a Tesco express and their car park.    I think you have to agree I do have the worst window view.  The skip is a just a wonderful addition to the overall vista.  That's only temporary obviously; temporary since last October, when a milk delivery lorry knocked down the wall.  I don't think waiting 6 months for the listed wall to be repaired whilst everyone takes advantage of the free dumping ground is too bad, all things considered.

This blog post is in answer to a call from Wooden Blinds Direct to showcase the worst view from a window as part of a competition.  If I don't win, then I truly feel sorry for whoever beats me!



My 1st Website competition

Asking someone to think back to the first web site they built, is a bit like making us remember back to days of shoulder pads and flares, dodgy haircuts and summer holidays spent camping in Bognor Regis... painful.

Frontpage, that scourge of many a would be website designer was my weapon of choice. (It was that or Hot Metal, which had come free with a copy of PC Pro or some such monthly magazine).  Easy to use and manipulate if you were savvy with the office suite, but not so user friendly if you were viewing the pages online.  Windows 95 had just arrived and amazed by how evolved it was on my little pentium with a whole 16gb of ram and connected to the world wide web by my 56k modem, I set about building my homage to Buffy and Angel and all things sci-fi.


At the time it seemed so clever, full of  every free line of code to do something that I could find, but when I think about it now, quite painfully sad and one dimensional.    I had a free hosting account on a server which was a bit dodgy, but it allowed me to host animated gif's.  They were really clever and they didn't take any programming expertise as I could just upload them like a picture.  In those days, I was all for free code, free ideas and flying by the seat of my pants.  The page was not professional in any way shape or form, but I loved it, it was my baby and I spent many hours looking at ways to improve on it, until it was a mismash of different styles all clustered around a black background.  I don't have many of the gifs saved on this pc anymore....



 
But some of them were amazing!
 
There were words flying in from all angles as the pages loaded, fonts of every shape and style clustered together like an advert for "how not to write a web page" and links that glowed and spun when you clicked on them.  I showed absolutely no respect for anyone waiting for the page to load as for me less is more was not a concept that I understood.
 
The website evolved over time to become far more polished and user friendly.  I learnt to make sure that it was compatible with all browsers, discovered Macromedia Dreamweaver and Invision power boards and ran a succesful forum from it for years.  I laid it to rest about four years ago, destined to live on only in my memory and now just build and look after the website for work, which is hosted on 123.reg.  It is because of them that I am writing this trip down memory lane as part of a competition they are running, the details of which you can find here:  http://www.123-reg.co.uk/first-website-competition.shtml , although I suspect that I may soon find myself one bored and lonely evening building another just for fun as thinking back has made me yearn for something more than just my little blog... now I wonder what freebies do they have?