Weekend update and some shameless begging

This weekend has been lovely and relaxing. The west of Scotland is currently having a little spell of lovely summer weather which is happily happening whilst I'm off work. Today I've spent most of the day at my parents' house sitting in their garden, enjoying the weather.



They have a little garden room thing in their rather small and wild garden, which is absolutely stuffed with plants. At the moment, they also have family of Blue tits in a nesting box in the eaves of their house. The chicks are about to fledge out of the nest and its been lots of fun to watch them sticking their little heads out plus watching their parents try to keep up with their food demands. Unfortunately I couldn't get a good picture of them.

Later we had a barbeque and I did a little outdoor knitting whilst everything got going.



Yesterday I was too tired to do anything very much so I ended up stitching for a few hours on the sofa. Rather than work on anything too challenging, I stitched up a Shepherd's bush kit from my stash - Keeping the bees. I'm thinking of finishing this into a pinkeep.



I'm hoping for a lot more stitching and knitting progress whilst I'm off on holiday and I will of course share pictures of the wall hanging that I talked about in my last post once I've seen the finished article.

You might notice that there is a new thing in my blog sidebar just now. My little sister Nicola is running in the Cancer Research race for life next weekend. She's been training for quite a few months now and has done so well. She started coming to the gym with me around this time last year after she stopped smoking and I'm very proud of her. Cancer has affected her life with her FIL being diagnosed with cancer and nearly dying just before her planned wedding date. Thankfully her FIL is still alive and fighting cancer as is a favourite Uncle of ours who was diagnosed with lung cancer over 5 years ago. Advances in treatment have meant that our Uncle is still alive today to meet his first Great grandchild, who was born last year. This is especially amazing given that he was given 18 months to live at diagnosis. So if you can spare a few pennies, I would really appreciate a donation. I see how cancer changes lives everyday at work so its a cause that is close to my heart. Unfortunately I can't be there in person to see her run but I wish her, and the hundreds of other people who have given up their time to run, lots of luck.