Spinning around!

Hello there.  Sorry it has been a while since my last post.  Last weekend was a busy one. Amongst other things we went to Brooklands Track for Auto Italia day on Saturday and saw lots of lovely Italian cars, although it was ridiculously cold for May!  Here are some friends for our baby:

On Sunday we drove down to the South coast for my eldest sister's 60th Birthday party.  We are now officially our nieces and nephews' "coolest aunt and uncle" as we turned up in the car.

Then, on bank holiday Monday, I woke up to find the room spinning, and it was nothing to do with alcohol (honest!).  I seem to have gone down with something called Labrynthitus, an inner ear infection which causes vertigo.  It is no fun as everything spins every time you move even a millimetre, your stomach churns, and you can't balance.  I spent the whole day in bed trying not to move.

Since then things have got slowly better but it has not gone completely yet.  I have been taking things easy, but at least I have been able to get on with going through my huge piles of food magazines. I've probably worked through another foot or so of magazines. I'm relieved to say that I also did manage to get along to my Bra Making class on Wednesday evening (still nothing suitable to show you I'm afraid).

On Thursday Dave took a day off from painting the house and we went along to the Grand Designs Live show at Excel to get some ideas for our new house build.  We came away with lots of inspiration.  Who would have thought that I could get so excited about pocket doors and extractor units?  And don't get me started on lighting systems and blinds!

We are off to Madeira next Wednesday, our first visit since I finished work, and are really looking forward to chatting to the builder about his plans and our ideas.  It will all feel a lot more real when we go back and stand on our chosen plot, and can visualise ourselves living there.  Sadly I will miss one of my bra making classes but hope to get to the following one on the day we return, as long as the plane is not late.

Another exciting development is that the company which runs the ferry from mainland Portugal to Madeira has finally released their timetable for the summer.  We now have a booking in the middle of July to take our car out there.  We will have a mini holiday driving down there through France, Spain and Portugal. Then we have all sorts of fun in store as we have been advised that the process for importing cars is incredibly complicated and laborious.  And we will need to arrange garaging once it is there as we will not be able to get such a low slung car up to our house in Funchal!  It would end up beached on the entrance to our condominium!  Having done that, we will be doing it all over again with the motorbike.  But we haven't picked a date for that yet.

I'll keep you posted on how we get on in Madeira.