Happy Halloween!

A little tiger waiting to pounce!

Jumping from block to block, with the speed and grace of a siberian tiger!

A witch-princess and tiger in conversation!

Things starting to get messy as the long day wears on!

Some quiet time with fruit and juice, before....

The fireworks!

The slugs shall not have them!

This is the apple tree in our garden;

It produces quite a lot of cooking apples;

Which I have been out in the cold gathering up;

And making apple crumbles for just about anyone on our street who wants one!

These are our cats, Manuelle and Louis;

And two other furry creatures dear to my heart!

Some recent pix!

Here's a picture of us by the East Wing of Black Towers, getting ready to go for a walk.

Phoebe by the back door.

In deep discusion

Playing in the side garden.

And the view from the back door.


Of course, our life isn't always so exotic!

A short rant about Tibet!

Me and my lovely sister!

Some Tibetans!

So – why Tibet? This was the most common question people asked on Saturday night. And my answer is this; as educators, parents, pet-owners, trainers of any kind we are taught that we should reward the good behaviour, and ignore the bad behaviour. Yet, internationally we seem to do just the opposite. If you look at the media there’s no end of stories about the Taliban, or Al Quaida, or even the IRA; yet where are the headlines about non-violent protests? How often do we hear about the Dalai Lama and the persistent peaceful resistance of the Tibetans, or Aung San Suu Kyi and the Burmese struggle?

So, I feel very strongly that if we want things to get better internationally we have to start showing that peaceful protest is a realistic alternative!


“Peaceful resistance and non-violence is the most important issue in international politics today. It seems to me that fighting terror with terror is not the best policy and that finding every way possible to support the world's greatest living proponent of non-violence might be a good idea.
It is now in the best interests of China to grant Tibet the degree of autonomy that it is supposed to have within the Chinese constitution. If this were done then the Dalai Lama and hundreds of thousands of Tibetans could return to Tibet and the path of non-violence would be seen to be effective.” – Isabel Losada

Too much on!

We've just been doing TOO MUCH recently!
We went to a birthday party for a friend who moved away.


We visited friends who live nearby.



We went out for noodles.

We went to the garden centre, where Guy made friends with the chipmunks.


And then, horror of horrors! The Christmas display:-



I'm stressing like mad about my Tibet fundraiser tomorrow night. All this week people have been dropping out.


I've had enough! I'm heading for bed!

We love chocolate!

Wow! I was tagged by MoziEsme (or more likely, her lovely Mummy!), who was discussing the joys of chocolate. Although this is not a common occurance it just so happened that we did stop for a little something on the way home yesterday. Here are the pics:




Loving that chocolate! Still, it will be advent soon and we'll be fasting again, so we'll enjoy it while we can!

Out and about!

The weather this weekend has been pretty dire. Wind and rain, and not a lot else!
So, it's back to the soft play centre (where I bumped into a school friend I hadn't seen for 14 years - and she recognised me!). Here are the pics:


Then today; church, then off to the circus (check out www.moscowstatecircus.com/show/photogall.htm )and pizza and ice-cream afterwards! Yay!