Church Recon Mission

In 2 weeks, Amanda's sister Angela is getting married to John in Gateshead near Newcastle. This weekend we had to go up to Amandas Mum's place so Amanda could try on her bridesmaid dress.


For the wedding I have volenteered to do the photos for the day, so we took a drive to the church so we take a look. I'll be nervous doing the photos for them as I want to make sure that I do a really good job, but I'm sure we'll give them a great wedding album.


Whilst we was at the church I took a few sneaky snaps of Anne, Barry, and Amanda to see what the place looked like on film :-) Will be doing it for real in 2 weeks.

San Francisco In Pictures

Simon, the guy I used to work with and visited in San Francisco in May, has started a blog that contains pictures of his stay in the city. He moved out there about a year when the company we was working for got bought out by a larger games publisher. Simon jumped on the oportunity and transferred over to one of the offices of the company that bought us.

Team Building With Guns

Today my employer took our department out on a team building activity day at Yeaveley Estate near Ashbourne. We met at the shooting lodge for 9.30 in the morning for a breakfast of bacon rolls, and we were then split into 4 teams. I was in team 1, and there were 10 people per team. The days activities consisted of archery, clay pigeon shooting, hover craft racing and fly fishing.


My teams first activity was archery. I had a slight upper hand in my team as I did a fair bit of achery when I was a teenager. We did about an hour and a half of archery and then had coffee. Next my team was up for clay pigeon shooting. This was the activity I was looking forward too the most. The gun we used was a 3 shot semi automatic shotgun and the thing kicked like a mule, brilliant!! I wasn't as bad at shooting as I thought I would be. I got 18 out of 25 shots, so I was happy about that. On the last round of shooting, my gun jammed on me. The instructor tried to get the thing working, but aparently a spring had gone inside the gun, so we had to use the girls gun after that, but it was only for a few shots.

After the shooting we headed back to the lodge for lunch. They put on a wicked buffet and we all had loads. Once we had all put on atleast half a stone we went for our next event. Hover craft racing.


These things are crazy, the steering is only 15% effective, you have to compensate by leaning far over to the left or right. You could get some great turns out of them, but if you let off on the throttle whilst doing a hard turn you end up going sideways, which I did a few times. The last activity of the day was fly fishing. It was good to give this a go, but It's not really my thing. Only 1 person on our team caught a trout, although we had to throw it back in.


I was completely knackered at the end of the day, and my shoulder was aching from the shooting, but I would definately like to give shooting another go sometime. If you looking for a decent activity day and are in or near Derbyshire, then go to Yeaveley.

Major Construction Project

During the week we had our new garden shed turn up. Our old shed had completly rotted and was knackered, so we bought a really good plastic shed, the Apex 6x4 as modeled above from the catalog (I'll take a picture of my one when I can be bothered).

About 4pm I took a sledgehammer to our old shed and it took about 30 minutes to smash it too pieces and break the wood down. Then about 5pm, Neil came around to give me a hand putting the new shed up. The whole thing took a couple of hours and was fairly straight forward. My master plan is to start brewing my own beer so the shed will become my new brewing lab :-)

Carolines Birthday BBQ

Today was Carolines birthday so She and Neil threw a BBQ party in the afternoon. Neil picked up Me and Amanda about 1pm as Neil wanted to borrow our BBQ and garden chairs. We decided it would be better to use 2 BBQ's rather than 1, that way Neil wouldn't be cooking all afternoon.

The afternoon was really good. Lots of food and lots of boozing, perfect for a saturday afternoon. It was good to just chill out in the evening as I spent the morning trimming the hedge around the house so was knackered :-)

Neil also made a huge jug of Pimms, but because he had never made it before, He mixed in far too much Pimms and it ended up looking like a jug of bitter. Wasn't complaining though, it tasted nice and packed quite a punch.