Day 12 - Whatever Tickles Your Fancy - Olaf

One of the great things about my time on the Doulos was all the amazing people I got to live with for a year. One of these is an Indonesian girl called Shinta, she's now married and living in the Faroe Islands and, as someone who has experienced life-threatening illness, now often has a project to encourage other people who are suffering. So, she sent me a bear called Olaf, who was travelling around the world collecting experiences before being sent to a little girl called Daniella in the USA. To find out more about Olaf (and Shinta) check out

http://hansshinta.blogspot.com/2010/01/olaf.html

Olaf arrived with me three weeks before my wedding, which means his time with me was spent mostly doing wedding preparations! But all the fun ones...
First of all he got to come to my hen (bachelorette) party – it was a very civilised affair, beginning with afternoon tea on the terrace of a country hotel.
Olaf had a sneaky taste of real English tea while I wasn’t looking! He didn’t manage to steal my scone though...



The next day, Olaf came with me to a dress fitting – it was one of the last ones so you get a pretty good idea of what my wedding outfit will be on the day!





Of course, it was soon time to say goodbye to Olaf and send him on to the next person. Hope you had fun helping me prepare for my Wedding, Olaf! Enjoy the rest of your travels!
 

Day 11 — A photo of you taken recently

I love this photo! My best friend, Bethany, came to stay with us during the Easter holidays and she accidentally created this work of art! I wish I could remember what had caused Olly to make that face... Caption competition, anyone?

Day 10 — A photo of you taken over ten years ago

This is easy - I only have two old photos of me on my computer!



My mum, sisters and me! Guess which is which? Not too difficult...

and you thought I'd left the blogosphere... Day 9 - a photo you took

Just to confuse you all, I took a year off.. Okay, I confess, I just got distracted by all the wedding prep but a few people have asked where I went so I'm going to try to make a comeback. Any bets for how long I last this time?!

Anyway, back to my 30 days of blogging



I don't have that many photos I've taken recently - my camera died a dreadful death and I've only just replaced it. Anyway, I took this picture of Notre Dame in Paris when I was on holiday with my husband, my sister and her boyfriend, who organised the whole trip (including us being there too) as a surprise for her 30th birthday - how romantic is that?

Day 8: A photo that makes you angry/sad

I don't recall having any photos that make me angry - I'm not sure why anyone would keep such a photo; surely that would lead you down the miserable road to bitterness? Although I'm sure I could find one online that illustrates some human rights outrage that would probably inspire anger. Anyway, I'm going to go down the 'sad' route instead.



That's a Baobab tree, for those of you who don't know. Looking at any of my pictures from my time in Senegal makes me a little bit sad - I miss it! Too much to really look at those pictures very often. Not just the place and the people, although obviously that plays a huge part in it, but also the work - it's the only time I've felt such a rightness about where I was and what I was doing. Fortunately, my self-imposed exile is soon to end - first Bible College, then back to Africa! Hurrah! We don't know exactly where we're going to be yet, and a lot can happen in a year, but East Africa is looking likely - it's not Senegal, but I'm assured they have Baobabs there too.

Day 7: A photo that makes you happy

Okay, I know I just posted, but this one is SO EASY:



This is me, just after Olly proposed (and I accepted). I think you can tell from the picture how happy I am about the whole situation...

Day 6: Whatever tickles your fancy

Well, since it's nearing the end of the month, what tickles my fancy is the fact that there's a new theme approaching! Last May, Bethany (my flatmate) decided she needed to use her imagination more when choosing clothes. She invited me to join this endeavour and named it 'no jeans June'. Since then we've been improving our lives in various ways through the simple medium of alliterative months. We're reaching the end of 'Aquatic April', where we had to drink lots of water and do other aquatic things like swimming, looking at rivers, wearing boat/naval inspired clothes. Sounds awesome, but we failed a little bit because we were both pretty busy this month.

Floral February was probably our most successful month since 'no Jeans June' - we both managed to wear something floral every day (more difficult AND expensive than you might immediately imagine) and our flat was abundant with floral displays. We also gave lots of people flowers, which caused many of them to try and get on board with our theme that month.

Anyway, even though we won't be living together for that much longer, we've decided to continue with our months for as long as we can... This is going to seriously stretch our imaginations/vocabularies! So far for the rest of this year we've come up with:

Musical May (oh yes, watching musicals, listening to the soundtracks... this will be fun.)
Juvenile June (wearing our hair in bunches/pigtails, revisiting childhood dens, reading Enid Blyton - could oust February in my favourites.)
Joyful July (a little vague right now, doing things that bring us/others joy. Culminating in the extreme joy of my wedding on the 31st!)
We're totally stuck on August - any suggestions?
Studious September (I'll hopefully be starting Bible College so that one's easy... Lots of preparation for going back into education!)

That's pretty much as far as we've got. Feel free to join in the fun - it may sound odd, but it really does bring variety to your life!