Wedding church...

I've had a lovely day today... Gem and I were up reasonably early (which wasn't a bad effort since we stayed up till gone 2am chatting and building lego!) and we went off to Shugborough Estate where The Earl of Lichfield used to live. Lovely place, the weather wasn't bad, the rain held off and we wandered about taking photos and generally being a bit touristy!

We came back mid afternoon as Gem has gone off to see Steps tonight, she had a spare ticket but I would rather stick pins in my eyes politely declined in favour of a lovely quiet night on my own.

I went into Stone with Kass and Jon for a mooch round the shops. We passed the church that Nicki and Chris are getting wed in on Saturday so I made them stop so I could go take a photo. I have a lot of nice photos from today but since I've not stopped talking about the wedding for the last few months, I figured you should see where it's happening! I think it's a really pretty little church, apparently Chris has charmed all the ladies who worship there, not a huge surprise really!

I had dinner with Kass and Jon in their cottage next door and then came back round to my pad and got my spreadsheet out to work out the sums for who is due how much and for the bus on Saturday and the electric cards. Funnily enough the woman forgot to mention that we'd need to buy electricity when we booked and there's not a trace on the website so effectively we've paid quite a lot for a roof, a missing bedroom and some water! It seems that we've used eight quid in 24 hours... it's surely not that expensive for electricity but there's no heat unless we plug in the electric heaters so I'm wearing quite a few layers. Glad I brought my slippers!

Never mind, she admitted that she'd got our booking wrong but didn't appear to want to offer any sort of compensation for that. I wish I was of the ilk who complained about this kind of stuff, I can do it really well by letter but that whole face to face confrontation is just not for me. So I've spent the last hour working out the sums of who needs to pay what when they arrive, I've sorted out the electric cards in the meantime and spoken to the man with the minibus. I am my Mother's daughter, of that there is no doubt!

It's lovely being in the country but it's REALLY dark and REALLY quiet. However, the plus side to that is the stars are amazing! Alas not tonight as it's just starting to rain a bit now and it's not that clear. I'm going to check again tomorrow and then rake out my tripod when there are more people around and I'm not likely to get murdered in my bed by some random bogeyman who might creep up on me.

I think maybe I'll have a glass of wine now and sit down with my camera book for dummies and work out how to take good pics of the stars (and sparklers!)

I'm sorry I've not been commenting much, the wifi connection is utterly rubbish, I'm still standing on one leg in the corner of the sitting room hoping not to lose my waffle! I'll be back on form next week!