The fox in our garden

On its daily afternoon visit - dont know if there are more than one, but this daily appearance has fascinated all our visitors who have seen it, this picture has been emailed to us :)

Our family hotel.....

The past 10 days have been a bit mad.......have had different sets of people over to stay and my life seems to solely consist of taking people shopping or sightseeing and cooking different meals for different appetites.

And I thought moving house and starting work again and the kids were a bit busy.

However it has all been lovely and very nice to catch up with people. When they are living in your house, its a different picture to when you meet them for a meal or coffee. I love sitting at the table after a meal and chatting about the good old days and whatever.

Also have been honing my long unused cooking skills - with the children, its mostly non spicy food or the standard Jeera Meera or Rechad. The past few days I have experimented and enjoyed it. Will post some pictures soon.

Best bit is the children are enjoying the company of close friends and relatives and being pampered - not with gifts but with time, which for me is the biggest bonus of all. They have played Housie, Ludo, Monopoly, Seven Hands, Donkey, made projector movies on a video cam and also just played cricket...... :)

Now life will start to go back to normal, or maybe not, have some more house guests for the next few months now...

After Earth review - what on earth has happened to MN Shyamalan

After weeks of procrastinating and other things coming in the way, H and I finally decided to go for a movie Sunday afternoon. My first choice was the Great Gatsby, read the books many many years ago and liked it. Also, there's meant to be a cameo by Amitabh Bachchan. Unfortunately the timings weren't right. Saw that M. Night Shyamalan had a new movie out, so booked and went.
And what a disappointment! I cannot believe this is the same director who made the Sixth Sense, or even Signs for that matter. Sixth Sense is one of my all time favourites, need him to make a movie like that, not another huge Hollywood studio mass formula production full of cheesy predictable material.
No point going into the story because its too predictable - synopsis is that its based in the future and Will Smith and his son are stranded on a very dangerous Earth, the son has to sort out a beacon 100kms away which will rescue them etc. Too predictable in the way Jaden Smith is saved and kept safe, in the special effects, in the background of what happened to his sister etc.
The one and only one moment in the film I perked up was when his sister appears and yells at him to wake up, turning into a nasty looking ghost(?) I kept thinking its going to turn surreal and unpredictable after that, but, never mind.
I actually looked at H a few times during the movie wondering what we'd paid to watch. Hopefully Shyamalan's next wont be the same and Columbia will let him make his movies without the mass formula.
As an aside, Zoe Kravitz, who plays the sister is extremely pretty. She is Lenny Kravitz's daughter (as is obvious). His song Again is one of my most loved. :)

20 degrees finally - Eating in the Garden

Yesterday, after ages, finally the temperature reached 20 degrees, with it being half term, the children were waiting to have a picnic in the garden. Had lunch outside with their visiting auntie. The garden needs lots of work/cutting back but taking it bit by bit. Its got lots of flowers, fruit etc but we're still discovering most of the plants.
Hopefully the weather will last and at least stay more than the 10 degrees we've been having. Their auntie has gone back to Bombay and 33 degrees or more there now....