Down memory lane

When I think of the TV programmes that I used to watch as a child and that have marked me the most, the obvious and typical ones come to mind first: Sesame Street (Spanish version), La Bola de Cristal, El planeta imaginario, Heidi, Willy Fog y la vuelta al mundo en 80 días, Dartacán, David El Gnomo, Érase una vez…, Los diminutos, Los osos gummies, La aldea del Arce, Lucky Luke, Fragel Rock, Dragones y mazmorras, Candy Candy, Dragon Ball, Campeones, Ulises 31, La pequeña Lulú, Pixie y Dixie, Pumuky, el Bosque verde, and many many more (I am probably forgetting some important ones!)

I believe I can sing the theme tune to every single one of these programmes and even name the characters, tell you the plot of an episode and even recall if I ever cried watching them or not. The thing is, that it just happened that by pure chance I had a trip down memory lane when I heard the tune to Waltzing Matilda the other day. This was the tune to one of my most beloved TV programmes when I was little and I had completely forgotten about it.

Secret Valley was about a group of children in a holiday camp who were always getting in and out of adventures and other “fights” with the baddies. After that came Professor Poopsnagle’s Steam Zeppelin (which Jon says it’s like Chitty Chitty bang Bang, but I never saw the latter so can’t comment on that!) and away my mind went in fantasies…

As a child, I always wanted to go to one of those holiday camps. Due to my family’s business, I used to spend a lot of time on my own in our country house during the summer holidays. Don’t take me wrong. I loved the country house, the animals, the fruit trees, the mountains, the tiny swimming pool.. however, I was on my own most of the time. For me, being able to go to a holiday camp was like a dream, a dream fed by those TV series and films (The parent trap, anyone?) but it never got fulfilled. I tried and tried many a time to convince my family, but as with many other of my requests, it got ignored and I was asked to stop pestering them with the subject. In my town there was a similar style of summer camp and I used to see the groups of children around. I must say that it didn’t look as glamorous as in the TV programmes or films, but it was the whole “camaraderie”, the fellowship, the friendship that attracted me.

Here in the UK you find all kinds of activity groups for children, like the Scouts for boys and the Brownies  for girls. I don’t remember having anything of the kind when I was growing up. I am pretty sure that when I have kids I will send them to one of these summer camps if so they wish, as I believe they are part of good development of character. And, a great way of socialising!

On being hacked and exchanging contracts.

I know it happens all the time all over the world, however I never thought it would happen to me! My Yahoo mail account (the one email account I’ve had for over 10 years) has been somehow hacked and it has sent spam to all my contact list. If you’re unfortunate enough to be one of them, I am terribly sorry

Thank god I’ve got a wonderful husband who understands the cyber world much better than me, and has given me a few pieces of advise on how to prevent this from happening again. I’ve changed my password (once again, the same password that I’ve had for over 10 years) for a more secure one and I will try to keep different passwords associated to different websites when they are connected to this Yahoo email account (basically, I won’t have the same password for the email and other websites)

Funny thing is that for the last 4 or 5 years I’ve been using my gmail account as my main account for personal mail and I just left the yahoo one for signing up to websites. So, everytime I have to register in a new website, I use the yahoo one. I should have tried to little by little delete my contacts list that I do not use any more, and maybe the extents of this “incident” would have been smaller. Now, I am not completely sure of how many people have received this spam email (selling a 2gb iPod I think) and I’m feeling a bit uneasy about going into Yahoo again!

On a separate note, today is Exchange Day. In the “buying/selling a house” world, this is when you exchange the contracts and is the step just before completion. Essentially what happens is the various legal parties agree what is going to happen on completion; who is buying what, from whom and for how much. The point is that there can be nothing outstanding in any part of the chain, otherwise the exchange will not take place. Thankfully, we don’t have a big chain (our buyers were renting, and could have easily moved with mum and dad if things/dates didn’t fall into place) and this has made things much easier and faster for us. Chains are known to go on for months until all parties can agree on a date that suits everyone.

So, fingers crossed and wish me luck for the big move in just one week!

It doesn’t know me at all, or does it?

I was quite surprised to open my Spotify this morning and find this in my front page:

Ermmm.. Hello??
Lady gaga?
Sevillanas?
Dance hits?

Doesn’t Spotify know me at all after so much time using it to listen to my favourite bands?

Oh, hold on… There’s something else at the bottom..

Ahhhh.. This is better, much much better.

“Buying a new house” – Decorating!

If everything works out as planned, in two weeks time we will be moving house…

I’m so excited!

The one thing I am most excited about is the whole decorating stage at the beginning. Before we unpack all our boxes and put all the furniture together again, we’re going to have to get some paint and some brushes and give the house some colour and character! (I’ve got nothing against “magnolia” colour, but it gets a bit too boring after two minutes looking at it, so imagine living 24/7 with it! It’s a no, I’m afraid)

I still don’t have a very clear idea in my head of what I want in each room, but these are some rough ideas:

Kitchen and utility room:
The kitchen is already fitted, so we don’t have to worry about the cupboards and stuff. However, the tiles are very plain and we’re going to have to add some colours with other items to give a bit more “life” to the room. I’ve seen a very very cute set of curtain styles for the utility room, but I’m not sure I should also put the same fabric in the kitcken because of two reasons:
1) I haven’t touched/felt the fabric and I don’t know if the material would be suitable for a kitchen (you need special materials that will cope with all the steam and maybe grease as well)
2) I want the curtain in the kitchen to somehow match the dining room one as well. They don’t necessarily have to be the same pattern, but the must match in style. These below are the ones I was thinking for the ultility room curtain.

Dining room:
As I said above, I still haven’t thought much of the colour scheme, but as long as it is fresh and lively I am happy. Green (a pistachio o lime shade of green ideally) is the colour that firstly comes to mind, but turquoises and aqua blues are a possibility too.

Living room:
We have three lovely windows to dress and I don’t mind what colour scheme we follow here. We’ve had a deep red scheme in Byfleet and I’d like to try some other colour. I think that I would like dark wood furniture and very light wall paint. With this combination I would also need curtains that stand out, so maybe a deep purple o darkish blue would be nice.. But, once again, nothing has been decided yet. This is an example of a “bold” curtain that I wouldn’t mind in the living room:

 

Needless to say, all soft furnishings will be matching the curtains!

Study:
We have already agreed to reuse the curtains that we already have in the first floor of the new house. I believe that the ones we have in the bedroom now will be going into the study. That means a blue, brown and beige scheme. Sounds good to me.
For the desks, we have seen a good set of desk and chairs (that hopefully will fit two off) at Ikea:

Second bedroom:
I think we have secretly decided to go for white furniture in this room, as we saw a very nice day bed / sofa at Ikea in white that we both liked. The curtains in this room will be dark green, yellow and orange, and if we’re going to have white furniture, I think we’re going to have to go for a bold colour in the walls. However, since it’s a very small room already, I am not sure if we should. We all know that dark paint make rooms look smaller. So this one is one to think carefully. Would something like this be okay?:

Master bedroom:
I think this is going to be the easiest, as we will be reusing the living room curtains that have a nice deep red wine colour. We will only have a “feature wall” in that colour (and probably not even a big one so it doesn’t overpower the rest of the room), and the rest of the red tones will come with other objects like paintings, pictures, etc.

Bathrooms/Toilet:
The wall and floor tiles are a browny/beigy colour, so the towels and mats will have to be in the beige/mocha side of colours… Maybe something along these lines:

 

So, yeah, that is the big plan! We don’t have a huge budget anyway, so we will have to play it by ear and try to get the best deals that we can. We’ll be buying our decorations in Wilkinsons rather than Laura Ashley and all those sensible things that we, tight and stingy people, do

Little Lambs

This week BBC2 has been showing a programme that I find simply fascinating. I had never ever in my life seen such a programme on national television and from here I want to praise the BBC for being so brave, out of the box and traditional.

The programme is called Lambing Live and it is all about little lambs being born! Live!… Simply fantastic.

My first impression was a mixed feeling of “this is gross” and “simply gorgeous”! But the more I looked, the more fascinated I became.

I think it’s very important to keep the younger-city-wise generations a bit in touch with their country-roots, and this is a great example of how to. It saddens me to think that some children have never seen a lamb, apart from the pre-cut chops that you can find in the supermarket meat section.