This Year

Decided to do a blog again for this year. After the horrors of last year there have been times when I thought I'd never want to think about things happening in my life, let alone 'blog' them...but as I write down a few thoughts in October I can report that Melvyn looks the picture of health and our wonderful, busy life seems to be back to normal. I suppose that once you've had cancer you never stop crossing your fingers, but life is good here and I hope it is with all of you.

December

I'm writing December's Blog even though the month has just started. We collected our friends from their cruise and today we drove them up to Tampa to catch their plane back to UK. Over the last few days the weather here has turned pretty cold (although as I write this I keep thinking of the freezing conditions back home), so it was quite appropriate to go to the theatre and see "White Christmas"...I even saw a woman in a fur coat...in Florida!!!!!

We had a Christmas get together with friends and neighbours which focused around Christmas cake and mulled wine. I found out too late about the joke over here about fruit cake. Only your worse enemy would give you a fruit cake at Christmas and then if you couldn't give it away to someone else, you'd use it as a doorstop! Having learned all this I still insisted they try it along with the mulled wine...(more shock and horror) and it went down much better than expected. Lauraine made some yummy versions of sausage rolls and there were plenty of nibbles and I think a good time was had by all.

We've still got 2 weeks left in Florida before flying home for Christmas. No doubt we'll find lots of jobs to do but hopefully there'll also be time to relax and catch up with friends over here.

Here's hoping you all have a lovely Christmas and New Year.

November

Two weeks after Katy and Mark got married we were celebrating another wedding. This time Samantha and Gavin's. It was a lovely event and fantastic to be able to enjoy it knowing that none of it was our responsibility. Two days later we were back on our way to Florida. We knew that there had been major builind work done on our condo over the summer so were prepared for the dust everywhere and spent a mad day cleaning and tidying before we drove to Tampa to collect friends, Bob and Hilary. They have been to stay with us several times so we enjoyed the routine of Florida life and found a couple of new places for them... including a boat trip to Egmont Key and the Ybor City Museum. Bob and Hilary broke up their two week holiday with a cruise to Mexico from Tampa.

As they left on the lunch time of 22nd of November, more friends arrived that evening. Paul and Lauraine hadn't been to this part of Florida before so we enjoyed showing them the places that we love.