Hair raising pre-Halloween

Naturally you are expecting a photo of me after having climbed out of bed at first light, scratching, belching, grunting and rubbing my palm across my wiry grey hair. But no, you would be wrong, as the wee girl has finally had her first hair-cut. Essentially her hair is rather fine, and so it gets matted after a nights sleep ( or as we like to think of it, the time where she lies down, and then yells out every two hours, without waking herself up - unlike us ). It finally got to the stage where we thought she was actually becoming a sheep, or a younger paler version of Bob Marley. Distracted by a bag of crisps ( she takes after her Dad ) Lynn our local hairdresser reduced the rattly dags to a cute bob.

Like some of us with a new haircut the gal has taken to wearing a hat, but this unfortunately seems to draw attention to her, rather than distract.

Lily went 'guising' with her other wee friends on October 31st, during a party hosted by Jude and Pascal, which was held in the courtyard of friends who all live next door to each other ( very handy ). The kids all dressed up in their outfits, while the parents drank mulled-wine, and bobbed for apples. Lily went as a spider, and scuttled around the garden with her friends, who were dragons, bears, cows, fairies and witches.








































The kids all ate about 100 sweeties, ran around in circles with each other, and then were dragged home by their parents, where they duly went to sleep at about 01:00 a.m. The parents all woke for work the next morning looking like witches and warlocks, and were told by their colleagues that Halloween was over, please remove the costume. Ha ha.

I'm off to eat the rest of Lily's stash.

Paradise Loched

Weather. What a weird thing. Inconvenient Truth or not, Scotland has finally got some warm weather -in October. Apologies to polar bears that do not have an ice-flow to walk over to get their frozen fish fingers, or whatever it is that polar bears buy at the shops, but we were just happy to get a weekend where it didn't rain. Last weekend was a corker, so Moira made a lovely picnic, we jumped in the car, and then drove about 45 minutes away to a fantastic loch. I never rememebr the names of these places, but they seem to have an 'Inver' in there somewhere, and of course end in 'loch', so lets just say we went to Loch Inverloch. There was probably some great battle there at some stage, where one clan bared their bums to another, and a great battle ensued, and bad blood has been felt between the two ever since, but in the end they all hate the English so it was probably their fault, the great jessie sassenachs. Anyway, the two Engligh girls, and the Kiwi fella, decided to get some sun on our faces, some sarnies in our tummies, and some midgies on our legs. In the photos it looks as if some tramp has hoved into view, and was trying to see if there were any crusts left over, and the chance of a wee dram, but I recognise him as being me. It is not that I took the All Blacks defeat heavily, I sometimes just do not shower, shave, brush teeth or smile, sometimes for days on end as a rule.

You can see from the last photo, Lily decided to try and start a new battle, known as the battle of Lily BigHorn, and Moira is making sure that the tramp has moved on.

Suffficed to say, today is freezing, it has rained for two days, and three polar bears have just walked past the window.

Lots of love

The McKs ( northern branch )