Tuesday
Took advantage of the weather to cook outdoors at my parents. They have a chiminea, and while Stuart’s played with fire there a few times, we’ve never got it together to actually cook. We spent the afternoon cooking; we decided to have a go making our own burgers, partly because we wanted to have a play with the burger press we got last year. Stuart got a good fire going very quickly (he has a worrying affinity with fire) and we spent the evening cooking and eating. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever had what could be classed as a BBQ with my parents, but I hope it becomes a regular thing.

Wednesday
I mention Wednesday only because I haven’t got the foggiest what we were actually doing. It’s not even that we were doing boring things that I (for once) edited out. There’s just nothing. It’s like the day didn’t happen. I’ve decided that we must have been very relaxed.

Thursday
Got an email on my work account from a colleague telling me about some issues at the office. It finished off “Given that it’s the nicest day of the week so far, I’ll be somewhat disappointed if you reply this afternoon. Get a life, woman.” I took this as a hint and logged off.

Stuart fancied actually doing something for once, so we drove down to North Wales – an area neither of us know. We went to Rhyl for the laugh, but were really surprised to find out that a place we’d been told was absolutely dreadful wasn’t at all, really. It had a lovely beach (with donkeys), the people were nice, and while it was obviously poor and past it, it wasn’t as hopeless as some other beach resorts I’ve been to.

Unlike the resort down the road. The locals were fine, but all the tourists were hard. You could see them glaring at you when you walked past, hating you with every scrap of their being. The resort looking unchanged from about 1950, with a weird mix of portacabins and older building that were falling down. Very very seaside – and it looked like exactly what it was; a cheap way to get away. Given the weather, I doubt it was that dissimilar to the Brits Abroad resorts anyway.

Sunday
Decided to celebrate what’s been a fantastic couple of weeks with a trip into Rusholme for a curry (God knows what that’ll do to tomorrows weigh in, but I don’t care. We went at lunchtime, so we were the only people in the place, but we’re rather glad that we went when we did because it’s currently the biggest thunderstorm I’ve heard in a long time. Waddling back to the car getting wet through wouldn’t be the ending I’d hope for.

Don’t laugh, but I’ve had a great time today tidying up the blog. There aren’t too many changes, but the code is much neater and I’ve split out the css prior to playing with different stylesheets for different viewing methods (like over my pda phone). And talking of my phone, I’m just about to upgrade the OS after losing my temper and googling something like “rubbish phone hangs slow crashes” and getting a link to a guy who had exactly the same problems as me until he upgraded the software. A bit nervous though, it involves doing some unlocky stuff with unofficial software and knowing me, I’ll break it.

Work tomorrow. I can’t wait.

The place is fab and it is also a place where red squirrels are surviving because it is being looked after to favour them rather than the greys. I am not really sure whether the priority there is to look after the squirrels or the sand dunes. All I know is it is a lovely place and I can highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys being outdoors.

We went there to have a picnic and fly some kites on the beach. Fortunately it was an absolutely beautiful day (although the wind was playing up a bit) so it was really nice being outdoors in the sun with the wind blowing against you. We all ended up going a little bit pink with too much sun (yes we did have sun cream on!) as it was so nice.

We took a few pics of us on the dunes eating and then the flying kites on the beach. I have not cropped the beach photos to show the kites better as I think the view across the beach is a better picture. The thing that looks like an old fashioned galleon/boat is exactly that. It is a sailing ship kite I was bought for christmas and this was the first opportunity I have had to fly it so we all assembled it on the beach and I had a brief fly of it. Unfortunately it needs a little bit of setting up and the beach was not the place to be doing it so we had it up for five minutes before bringing it down and putting it back into it’s box.

I hope you enjoy the pics of the dunes and the beach. It really is a lovely place and if you get the chance you should go.