A bit of a catch up

Good heavens seems like I have been on the computer all morning. Hang on... I have been on the computer all morning!!! I am so glad to be done for now with messing around, transferring and deleting stuff. Anyway, time for a bit of a catch up which I shall do in list form.

The school holidays are over. Simon goes back to school tomorrow. The time has just flown by and although we have done quite a bit there are loads of things left undone. We had planned days out but they  didn't happen. The garage however has progressed.

 

 

 

 

We had my Dad with us for 2 days last week and I think that he really enjoyed himself. He liked seeing his 4 great grandchildren and it was lovely to see as he is really engaging with them now.

We had several family picnics during the holidays and I have a lot of photos that I will post shortly. Posting photos is not an easy thing here. It is OK putting them in the body of a blog but albums are a whole different ball game where you have to faff around with another site. Pain in the you know where.

We did get around to cleaning the old grave stones of Simon's ancestors and again I have a load of photos. To post.

I think I am going to open another Blogger site for my Recipes. What a pain that it is necessary to have all these different sites. I know they link well with tabs to go to them but ...well it isn't Multiply is it!

I am currently waiting for Simon who is putting a window in the garage. We are supposed to be going to Tesco for food shopping. They close at 4pm as it is a bank holiday here in the UK.

I know a secret............. May be able to tell soon.......

Hmm, what else? There were loads of things that I thought of earlier but my mind has gone blank. Really think I should go and chase up Simon. I need to do the shopping today as I will not have access to the car once he is back at school. The chap that he car shared with was made redundant and as there is no one else that lives out this way, I will be car less during the week which could be difficult at times.

Back later or tomorrow and will hopefully get some of those photos up. With Simon back at school normal service will hopefully resume!

Side bar stuff from Multiply

On Multiply we had a side bar which we could fill with "stuff"  I had quite a lot of stuff and as a reminder to myself I am posting some of them here.  It would seem that it is not really possible here to customise to the same extent.

First off I had an eternal flame.  It reminds me of my Mum and Rosie and Sandy.

I also had a memorial for Rosie.

Below that I had a clock, a moon phase widget and a cluster map to show where my visitors were coming from.

Underneath those I had daily clicker buttons.  You know the ones where you click once a day and a donation is made to a charity.  I had The breast cancer site and the animal rescue site.  I wish that I could have them on blogger

I had a blogversary button.......

Then I had these ........

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I really, really wish that I could have them on a side bar here.  Maybe someone can tell me how to do that?

Jilly

Finishing up

The entry below is the final one that I will make on Multiply.   I am getting everything pretty well set up here on Blogger and I think this will be my new home although at the moment I shall keep Blogster updated too.  I just hope that this will be a happy new place to lay my hat. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Well I have finally moved every last blog from here over to my Blogger site. I have also moved all of the doggies blogs and closed down their site. I shall gradually be deleting all of my albums. I have no need to download them as they are all stored on my own hard drive and also in the cloud.

I shall take down the images in my side bar over the next couple of days and place them on Blogger. Then I shall begin to delete entries from here starting with the oldest first.

I will continue to cross post from Blogger for those few of you still here. I will do so until the end. However I will not be using this site to read or comment on blogs. I know where most of you are. I have contacted everyone.

Should you wish to find me my primary blog will be at: http://pinkduchessofmorton.blogspot.co.uk/

Sadly it seems that we have all gone to different places and I cannot keep up with checking on half a dozen different blog sites so inevitably I will lose contact with some of you. If you are one of them, well it was nice knowing you and sharing bits of our life stories. I hope that you find a nice blog site and that new friends will come along and join you. Who knows we may meet up somewhere else in the future.

As always...... I wish you enough.

Jilly

New pages!

Woo hoo, I am adding pages.  Thanks to Baz for the help on adding a photo page.  Why on earth does Blogger not have photo albums?  Stupid, stupid.  So I am going to put my photos on FlickR and then I can post a sort of gallery on my photo page which will take you to them if you choose to click.  I like to have photos posted for my friends to see.

I keep all my photos on my own hard drive and I also have Live Drive which is in the cloud and copies every single thing on my hard drive for extra safety. In theory I shouldn't ever lose anything ever again!  Consequently I am not worried about FlickR vanishing.  Not worried about my Multiply albums either. 

You can just share directly from FlickR and it puts them in a blog post which is ok but I kind of like the idea of having them on a separate page.  You do have to post them as a blog first and then copy the html so it is a bit of a faff.  I may get bored with it!

You will see the links to my new pages at the top.  There is a quick note one where you can leave me a message, then there is Jilly's blog which will take you to my other Blogger site where you can find all my old Yahoo and multiply posts.  Finally there is the photo gallery.  I think I will add another one for recipes....eventually.

I am getting to like Blogger and I am finding my way around.  I still do not like that it is much harder to see your sites and posts.  I have the Rss thingy going and the Google reader but it is so much messing around!  I HATE that I can't delete stuff from the reader too. 

Hey ho, guess I will get used to it.  Still have not got to grips with Google + and can't really see the point of it.  I cannot see what it will add to my blogging experience.

Bed time now.  Nite nite!  XX

A busy week

This is the last week of the school holidays for Simon.  He will be back at work next Tuesday.  Consequently the week is flying by quicker than ever. We seem to be constantly busy and yet at the same time there is so much stuff that we wanted to get done during the holidays and we haven't done it.

The main reason is the garage extension. Simon had originally hoped that by the end of the holidays he would have it up and could be getting the insulation and electrical work done inside.  This is not going to happen.  The tremendous day after day rain  made it impossible to work for weeks on end.

Progress is being made though.  There are now quite a few more panels up and some have been cut for windows.  My sister is coming tomorrow with her husband Pete who will help for the second week running.  Hopefully if the weather holds they will get quite a lot done. Unfortunately he found out today that the roof timbers which should have arrived by the weekend will not be here until the beginning of September.  This is a blow as it will hold up progress and until the roof goes on it will not be totally sound.  It is partly his own fault because he should of ordered them earlier but didn't.  Typical of Simon!

My sister is bringing my Dad up with her tomorrow and he is going to stay a couple of days.  Hopefully the weather will be nice as we are planning another family picnic on Saturday.  We started the school holidays with a picnic so now we are finishing with a picnic.

Today we had dentist appointments so we were out this morning.  Our dentist is in Spalding which is about 20 minutes by car.  We found out that our dentist Theo who we have known for years is actually quite ill.  He has cancer.  Really hope he makes a full recovery.

On the way back from the dentist we stopped in the village of West Pinchbeck to visit a butchers shop that Sam had said is excellent.  He warned us we may have to queue as it is very popular.  In the event we didn't but it was busy with a constant stream of people.  We spent quite a lot on lots of stuff for the freezer.  It has won the best butcher in Lincolnshire award for about the last 10 years.  We had pork loin with stuffing wrapped in puff pastry for dinner and it was lovely.  Best of all it only cost £2.70 and was more than big enough for the 2 of us.  We shall go back there again.

Most of the rest of the day I have been continuing to move my old blog posts over to Blogger.  I have 450 still to go.  Nearly there.  It is driving me potty but I do want to save them.

Might not be on here much the next few days as I will have my Dad here and will no doubt be busy.

More on RAF Folkingham

We have been doing a bit more digging around for information on RAF Folkingham. It is really interesting.   On  the 6th of June 1944 (D-Day)  transport aircraft operating as part of Operation Overlord flew from Folkingham to Picauville in France to drop US paratroopers  in an attempt to bolster the Normany landings. 4 aircraft were lost that day and many damaged.

After the war and before the missiles arrived it was actually used as a test track by British Racing Motors (BRM) Formula one team.

When the military finally moved out the land was sold to a local man, one Mr Nelson.  He is now dead but the family business is still run by his sons in the neighbouring village of Kirkby Underwood.  They deal in all kinds of heavy machinery spares.

Simon was talking to our next door, but one, neighbour Richard who has lived in Morton all his life and knows everything.  Seems to be related to most people too!  Sure enough, he used to know Mr Nelson and in fact his own sister is currently married to one of the Nelsons.  He told Simon that there used to be many more vehicles parked up there.  As many as 5000 at one time and it was estimated that there would have been around 20 million tonnes of scrap metal!!!  Simon said the current price of scrap is about £70 a tonne so that gives some idea of the value.  Obviously over the years this has been reduced as they used to take the parts and sell them.  You couldn't do that now as they are too far gone.

The Nelson family were apparently very wealthy and when the railway from Bourne to Sleaford closed he purchased the whole lot including the land. buildings and rolling stock.  Richard said the first thing he did was to remove the tracks.  He had over a million sleepers which he sold.  The rails all went for scrap.  Then he parked diggers and tractors and all kinds of heavy machinery on the land.  According to Richard who can actually remember this as the railway line went through Morton, there were thousands of them. It must have been a very ugly sight.  

At some point he would have made even  more money as the land is now covered in a new private housing estate. I am talking about the land here in Morton. I don't know about other land but that line went quite a long way so there would have been a lot of it.

I have kind of gone off the point here!  According to various websites, when the military departed they left behind the war time bomb dump, and abandoned bomb stores in the forested area to the east.  Plus the 3 Thor missile pads made of reinforced concrete are still in situ as they  were considered uneconomical to remove.

Here are some web photos which are much better than mine!

THEN

NOW 

We spent quite a lot of time on Sunday evening studying the area on Google Earth.  It is fascinating.  We were particularly intrigued by lots of odd shapes in the woods.  They appear to be about car size but you cannot see what they are. We had read that there are more vehicles dumped in the wood so we though that must be what we were seeing.  We could also see 3 distinct triangle shapes along one path which we thought must be the missile bases.

Yesterday we loaded the bikes into the trailer and drove up there to explore the woods.  The area is known as Temple Wood and is managed by the Forestry commission.  There are some clear paths which it is perfectly possible to cycle but the vegetation off the paths is so thick and high that in most places it would be hard to get through.

The woods are really nice and very peaceful but we were disappointed as we couldn't find anything at all except a couple of look out towers and a pile of broken concrete!

We could not see evidence of what we could see on Google Earth.  We did find the triangle shapes but they are just that, there is no evidence of any missile bases so maybe we had made a wrong assumption.  It is really intriguing. We did discover that one path actually comes out right onto the airfield.  There was a big earth moving machine sort of blocking the way but we think that would be to prevent off road cars.  There was nothing to say private property but I guess they wouldn't expect epolpe to come crashing through the woods.

Simon is going to go back one evening with Sam and they will go in that way through the woods.  Simon wants to try and locate what those things are in the woods and find the missile bases as well as check out the "grave yard".

Evie you would LOVE this place.