Last Friday Aimee and Lubo came over for dinner and a movie which was really fun! We watched “Yes Man” and another movie that I can’t remember the name of at the moment. We had planned on going to the Hoppings which is a fair that comes to Newcastle every year but the forecast had said about 80% chance of rain so we changed our plan to dinner and a movie instead of the fair. As it turns out it didn’t rain but we had a really nice evening anyway.

On Saturday Aimee came with Melissa, Abby and I on a walking retreat. It was in County Durham so not far away at all. Unfortunately the forecast was correct for Saturday and it poured during a good portion of the walking retreat. We soon learned that our backpacks were not waterproof at all and that the contents were pretty soggy! When we stopped for lunch it cleared up a little bit and from then on it just sprinkled or was windy which was actually nice because we dried out a lot by the time we got back to the retreat center where we were given tea and scones :) The day started and ended with a reflection. The theme was about being open to new ideas, new adventures, etc. which I think is a great theme and ties into our year in England very well although the rain made it harder for me to reflect during the walk and I ended up thinking about my wet feet instead- oops. One line of the song we listened to was “open to Yes” which made us all giggle inside because we had just watched “Yes Man” the night before and in the movie the main character is told to say yes to everything.

On Sunday Brother Ralph took us to Causey Arch which is just outside Gateshead. It is the oldest surviving railway bridge and was used to transport coal to the Tyne River. There is also the Tanfield Railway right by the bridge which is a heritage railway that runs for 3 miles from Sunniside to Tanfield. We didn’t take a ride on the train but saw it go by several times. We took a walk in the woods near the arch and railway and saw the River Burn that runs under Causey Arch. It was a fun afternoon out with Ralph!

This past week flew! We had extra school groups come in on Monday and Friday which helped the time go faster! I have really enjoyed working with the various school groups throughout the year and this coming week will be the last week we have any school groups in. Since I applied for and got a grant to buy ingredients for the cookery sessions I’ve been running with the school groups I am in the process of filling out an evaluation for. I asked the teachers to send me some feedback from their students and their opinion of how the sessions went, etc. I got some back this past week and it was fun to read the comments the kids wrote and all their creative spellings for words like spaghetti (spogety, spegety), sausage(sosuge, sosed, sosaged), pizza (pezer, pizzer) and even my name (Lorer, Lora)!

Yesterday I decided to go to Tynemouth one last time (might get another chance to go but I’m not sure). The sky was looking a little iffy but I put my rain jacket in my bag and went. The weather was beautiful when I got there- upper 60s with a warm breeze! There were tons of people out and about and I’m not surprised because it was finally feeling like summer! Melissa had found out from a friend that lives in Whitley Bay that there are some cool caves in Cullercoats that we had not seen so I made it my goal to walk up to Cullercoats and see some caves. I’m not sure what I was expecting but they were a lot smaller than I imagined but they were fun to see anyway. I sat on the beach and read for a little while and kept an eye on the darkening clouds coming my direction. Luckily the clouds never produced any rain and I headed back when my stomach started grumbling. There were several groups BBQ-ing on the beach and it smelled amazing! We decided that fish and chips sounded like a good dinner and went to Mr. Gee’s just down the road and got fish and chips for £2.20, yum yum!!! I think I’ll have to do that one more time before leaving since it is really tasty and not very expensive.

Today we went to mass at 11 am at the Chaplaincy and then all went in different directions. I wandered around town before going to the Great North Museum which opened at 2 pm. I walked through Eldon Square and wandered into a few stores before stopping at Tesco for a pasta salad to eat for lunch and decided to go down to the Quayside to eat it. Each Sunday there is a market down on the Quayside so it was pretty busy but a much better place to have lunch than the middle of a busy shopping street. There was a zip line across the Tyne today as well so it was fun watching that take place and people screaming as they went down the zip line. I’m pretty sure you had to sign up in advance to do it and even if you didn’t a skirt probably wouldn’t have been the best thing to wear while flying across the Tyne!

I have 3 weeks left of working at Kids Kabin and Common Ground and they are going to fly by! Yikes! I am also going to participate in the Great Tyne Row on July 24th so I will either be traveling with Melissa or Abby (both have friends coming over to travel for 2 weeks before going home) between finishing working or hanging around the area and taking day trips to places nearby that I didn’t get a chance to visit. I am working on setting up something to do in France (WWOOF or workway) for a few weeks after the Great Tyne Row and will let you all know when I have it figured out….I am way behind on this and stressing out about it since it has not been as easy to organize as I had hoped and there is a chance it will not happen and if that is the case I will be home the end of July instead of the end of August.

I hope you are having a great summer! I look forward to catching up with everyone when I return!

The Sun Dried Tomato Pesto Mix Up

On Wednesday after Kids Kabin I went to the grocery store as I normally do on Wednesday evenings. When I got back Melissa and Abby had already eaten (we make our own dinner on Wednesdays - every other day of the week one of us cooks dinner for all three) and told me there was some pasta left on the stove and Sun Dried Tomato Pesto in the fridge. I was super excited because I was starving and it sounded really tasty! So I took a jar of "Sun Dried Tomato Pesto" out of the fridge, put some pasta in a bowl and put two nice big scoops of "pesto" on it and heated it up. I got myself a cup of water and sat down in the living room to enjoy some tv with my dinner. I took a nice big bite of the pasta and to my surprise found my mouth was on fire! I was shocked! How could Sun Dried Tomato Pesto be hot?!? As I quickly drank all my water I realized that the last time Melissa got some of Bruce's Hot Sauce it was in a Sun Dried Tomato Pesto jar (as you can see from the picture the two jars look pretty darn similar and even the colors of their contents look very very similar)! And he said this was the hottest batch he had made (Bruce works at Kids Kabin with us)! Yikes! After eating a banana to cool the fire in my mouth I told Abby and Melissa what I had just done and they practically fell off their chairs they were laughing so hard! I have to admit, it was pretty funny! Even though I do not like wasting food there was no way I was going to eat that bowl of pasta and I made myself a new bowl of pasta - this time I actually put Sun Dried Tomato Pesto on it and it was very tasty!

Melissa and I have been struggling the last few weeks since the sun rises at 4:30 am and our really nice new windows do not have any blinds! We were going to buy some blinds and put them up but Sr. Sylvia said they would buy them for us but would have to get approval from the London office that handles the money for home repairs, etc. However, the lady was on holiday and then Sylvia was going on holiday for two weeks so it would take awhile to get the approval. After a few weeks of waking up way way too early only to toss and turn until my alarm went off I came up with the idea of cutting cardboard to fit into my window frame. So Monday night I had a half hour battle with two big pieces of cardboard and transformed my room into the "Laura Cave" as Abby now calls it. The great thing is I can take the cardboard out in the morning and put it back when I go to bed so that it is still light in my room during the day. I had tried taping things over the windows before but it didn't work well and then I wouldn't take it down and have a darker room all day or it would fall down half way through the night and I would have to use more tape to put it back. It is amazing how much of a difference the cardboard makes and honestly the cardboard is probably better than any blinds we would find! Now I can sleep past 5:30 am with not problems at all! In fact, it is pretty much completely dark even at 8:30 am when I normally get up :)

http://community.newcastle.gov.uk/libraries/2011/06/09/a-snapshot-of-the-geordie-language/

In September I had no idea what alreet, scran, why-aye, toon, tatties or divvent meant but I'm glad to report that I have come a long way in understanding Geordie! I still hear words each week that I don't know and an article that Newcastle Library put together proves that I still don't know a lot of Geordie words! According to the article:

"The top 20 Geordie words as nominated by people from across the region were:

1 Gannin (Going)
2 Canny (Well, fine, very)
3 Clarts (Mud)
4 Hinny (Honey, sweetheart, friend)
5 Divvent (Do not)
6 Clarty (Muddy)
7 Hoy (Throw)
8 Nettie (Toilet)
9 Doon (Down)
10 Lass (Woman, girl, wife)
11 Hacky (Dirty)
12 Hadaway (Go away)
13 Hyem (Home)
14 Plodge (Wade)
15 Toon (Town)
16 Why-aye (Yes, I agree)
17 Alreet (Alright)
18 Claggy (Sticky)
19 Knaa (Know, no)
20 Marra (Workmate, a match/equal) "

It was interesting for me to read the list because some words that I hear all the time and think are great (ta, tah rah, scran, pet, cuppa, etc.) are not on the list but others I've never heard before are on the list. Then again, some of the words I like are probably just be ordinary British words and not specifically Geordie. I'm sure I will miss the Geordie accent a bit when I go home and it will be interesting to see if any words automatically come out when I get home resulting in funny looks for people having to ask me what I'm mean.

This weekend I was busy busy busy cleaning my room. I spent 4+ hours on Saturday cleaning my carpet. First I used the normal vacuum and then the special heavy duty carpet vacuum we borrowed from Brother Ralph. Since there was so much soot stuck in my carpet it took ages to clean and even after 4+ hours spent vacuuming my small room the water was still black! It was hard to tell if it was working sometimes but the end result confirmed that it was working! My carpet does look a lot nicer although I know it could still use some work. Today was spent washing my walls since there was still a lot of soot on them. Again that took ages but it is really nice now that it is done! It feels really nice to finally have everything cleaned from the soot disaster! I rearranged my room when I put all the furniture back but I’m not sure it will stay in this arrangement or not. I’ve wanted to rearrange my room for awhile but it may take another rearrangement or two to get the best configuration.

Below are picture of before and after pictures as well as a picture of the water from the vacuum (sorry the "after" picture turned on its own and I can't figure out how to rotate it in blogger). As you can tell from the after picture it isn't totally clean but it is a lot better. I think I might vacuum again with the carpet/steam cleaner next weekend to get it even better.



The weather this weekend has been pretty crummy-rainy all weekend! However most of the country is experiencing a drought so I know it is definitely needed!

Saturday was a leaving mass and celebration for the priest at the Chaplaincy where we go to church whenever possible. It was a nice mass followed by lots of yummy food! Sunday was the leavers’ mass for the Chaplaincy and we were considered leavers’ even though we are not students. All the leavers’ were given the book “How to Survive the Rest of Your Life” which sounds useful and it was written by a priest in the Hexham and Newcastle diocese which is cool. The mass was followed by a BBQ and as they say “all you have to do is plan a BBQ in England and you are guaranteed rain”! Despite the rain it was still a nice BBQ and a nice way to wind down the weekend. The Chaplaincy has been a very nice place to go since the population there is about our age, we could relate to the messages in the homilies so much more than at St. Anthony’s and everyone is super friendly! Luckily there will still be Sunday morning mass at the Chaplaincy until the Sunday after we leave! We were worried for a moment that it was the last mass but it wasn’t!

I hope you all had a wonderful weekend!

Hello Everyone,

Sorry it has been sooooo long since I wrote a blog post. I actually have several half finished blog entries in word documents that may or may not eventually end up here. The past 2 months have been very busy – including lots of traveling! Here is what I’ve been up to:

I never mentioned the great soot/dust disaster of 2011 so I suppose it should be mentioned as it caused a lot of frustration and extra work for me. It happened on Tuesday April 12th. We were told about an hour ahead of time that people were coming to replace the windows in my room, Melissa’s room and the window in the upstairs closet. My windows were leaky so they did need to be replaced and they had been looked at but had not been told when they would be replaced. It was tricky because the flat we live in is owned by the sisters’ but the flat below us in Council Housing so there is some rule about the Council actually owning the frame on the house and therefore responsible for the roof/windows in the roof so we had to wait for the Council to send people to fix them instead of hiring a private contractor to do the job. When we found out they were coming I was on my way out the door to go to Common Ground but decided I would take everything off my desk and dresser so it wouldn’t get dusty and boy am I glad I did! I was expecting a mess when I got back that evening but nothing close to how extremely dirty it was! It was so disgusting! Every surface was covered in a think black dust/soot type powder!! There was even dust and plaster chucks between my bed sheets! Everything under my bed was covered as well and some dust also made it into my closet! There were apparently tarps over my bed and other parts of my room but I have a hard time believing that! I spent hours that evening cleaning my room (with Abby’s help) and even though it wasn’t close to being clean we decided to stop for the day. I spent the next few days sleeping in the living room while the dust finished settling and it could be cleaned enough that my feet didn’t turn black when I walk in my room. I have yet to use a deep cleaning vacuum to get the carpets really clean and the walls need to be washed.

The Easter Holidays were 2 full weeks plus a Bank Holiday Monday so Melissa, Abby and I took advantage of this time off to do some traveling. I went and visited a good friend, Michelle, in France before meeting up with the others in Rome for Easter. From there I went to visit another friend, Emeline, in Pienza while the others went to Naples. I met back up with them in Florence and from there we went to Venice. It was a fantastic trip filled with lots of great food, wonderful sights and lots of laughs! I plan on writing a separate entry about this trip.

Once we got back to Newcastle I had a very busy week and a half before Mom, Dad and Patrick arrived to travel around the UK for just over 2 weeks. I met them at the airport in Edinburgh where we visited for a few days before heading down to Newcastle. It was great to be able to show them around the area as well as Kids Kabin and Common Ground – now when I talk about these places they will know what I’m talking about which is great! We also went to Durham, Tynemouth, Bath, London and Canterbury. It was great to get to spend 2 weeks with my family! Again, this really deserves a separate entry.
This past week was another half term so the kids had school off and Kids Kabin ran some camping trips. I went on one of the camping trips and we went up to Rupert’s Wood (I went to Rupert’s Wood once before in February to help with some projects). We took a group of the young volunteers (kids over 12 who come to training once a week and then can help run sessions at Kids Kabin) and for the most part it went well. The girls were more problematic than the boys but that was definitely expected! They couldn’t seem to keep their rubbish in their bags or put it in the rubbish bag and didn’t want to help with the community project we were doing at Rupert’s Wood. Even though there attitudes could have been better they did really enjoy running around the woods, playing in the pond catching tadpoles and just being kids. The boys were very focused the entire time because they were making a fort to sleep in and were in heaven being outdoors. Their fort turned out very nice and they actually slept in it overnight! When we were getting ready to leave the next morning they all begged to stay another night so I know they enjoyed themselves which is good! It was a pretty quick trip as we left around noon on Tuesday and got back at 1 pm on Wednesday but I think it is better to have it a little shorter and have them wanted it to be longer instead of it being too long and getting bored at the campsite which would lead to them causing problems and fighting with each other.

Thursday was a particularly quiet day at Common Ground and my guess is that everyone was out enjoying the beautiful weather! Many people come to Common Ground on days when they don’t need any help with their case just to socialize and have somewhere to go but being such a nice day I’m guessing they took advantage of it spent the day outside.

Today was a staff training day at Kids Kabin. We started out with almost 3 hours of spring cleaning (even though it is June) which was really good to do and then had about 4 hours of a meeting to discuss various topics.

I can’t believe how extremely fast the time is going! I have 6 weeks left and there is still so much I want to do! I need to come up with some goals for the time I have left and just make sure I get the most out of my remaining time here.