Hey guys,

 Guess who finally got around to updating this then?! Yup,  I'm a great blogger...
In my defence this past month has been just as mad as the previous one. I last posted on October 24th, I moved back to Northern Ireland on the 26th. That little space of time in between was spent boxing and wrapping everything left in the house to prepare for the move and then packing it all into our hire van.





Eight hours on the boat brought us into Belfast and we were finally able to disembark at around 7pm (loooong day already)  then we drove the thirty minutes to my gran's house where we offloaded the contents of the van into her garage. After we'd emptied the van, TJ and I parted ways. He took the van over to his parents' house to get settled in and I took our car to my parents' house. Cue sleep.

 After trailing through pages of job adverts I got a call to ask if I could come for a interview the day after I got home and so I agreed and headed down on the 27th to be interviewed. On the saturday I was offered the job. Not bad eh? Three days in the country and I was employed, pretty pleased with myself about that one! After being offered the job on the saturday, I started working on the Monday morning and that's been me busy full time ever since!

Two weeks were spent staying with our respective parents and now TJ and I have moved in with my Gran so we can start to save for a house! Exciting ( & a little terrifying).

The week after Teej and I moved back, my sister and brother-in-law moved house (I'm so sick of seeing boxes)! Though seeing their new place has only spurred me on for wanting a nice house that we can be proud of. I am so sick of student style living. The student lifestyle & I did not mix well.

Tj has been busy renovating his parents' garage ever since we got back. He needed studio space for his film work and this was the perfect place. Three solid weeks of gutting, painting and carpeting later and he finally had a finished studio as of the start of this week. I love that he's got somewhere to go and work so he can split his time between work and home life instead of them meshing into one like when he worked from home.



We're finally getting into a routine again now. I'm going to work and so is Teej. I love that now I can just drop in with my parents to say hello as i'm only ten minutes away and my mum & I have a weekly girls night penciled in. I have no doubts that moving back was definitely the right thing for us to do. NI may be smaller and quieter than England, but it's home.

The main thing I'm missing from England now is Theatre and music. I no longer have my weekly singing lessons with Claire or my rehearsals at Encore and its becoming more and more obvious to me that I need that in my life! I auditioned for a local theatre group but two weeks on and I'm still waiting to hear their decision either way, it is killing me a little to wait. Fingers crossed they want me.


So for now it's time for me to relax & enjoy the run up to Christmas, with my family all here with me and this year i get to look forwards to my first birthday in three years spent at home! It's the little things. (:


 Until next time,

  It's Monday now. I move home on Wednesday. Two days. This past week has been intense and amazing and a little heartbreaking all in one go.


TJ's parents were here from late last week until Tuesday and it was great to spend some quality time with them. Teej and I have been together for years but with living in a different country, seeing each other's family kinda goes out the window at times because we're spending all our time with our own when we visit.

During their visit we went on lots of trips to various places in the area but my favourite was a day trip to the Emma Bridgewater factory. If anywhere is going to make you want to throw away all your hard earned money on crockery, this place is it. It's based in Stoke and I'd highly recommend their experience day. Painting and afternoon tea is included!

Behind the scenes action ______________________________________ My evenings all through the week have been dedicated to theatre. Tuesday & Wednesday consisted of rehearsals and making sure everything was ready for our show 'Rock of Ages', and Thursday, Friday and Saturday were dedicated to performing our hearts out in front of an audience. This was the best show I've ever been in. The whole experience was amazing from start to finish and the show received some fantastic reviews. I've spent nearly two years with this drama group and as of last night, my last performance with them was done. Its hard to describe how I feel about leaving them behind. It has been an absolute honour to share a stage with some of the most talented people I've ever come across but it breaks my heart a little that I won't be up there with them for the next show.  On reflection, I'm lucky. A lot of people don't ever get to share their passion with a group of amazing, likeminded and talented people who inspire them to push themselves.  I'll miss them most of all. Rock of Ages ______________________________ Now all the excitement is over, I'm suffering major post show blues and am ready for the house to be left behind. There are boxes everywhere you turn, and countless more trips to the dump and the charity shop have been made. We pick up our moving van tomorrow so some of our boxes can be moved out of the house and into it ready for leaving on Wednesday morning. This move has been a year in the making but it still feels like it has just snuck up on us.  Come at me Wednesday. Until next time,

 Morning Folks!

 As I type on this bright and sunny Thursday morning, I have (officially) thirteen days left in England. THIRTEEN. Madness.

This past week has been another busy one, we're finally getting into the swing of packing and while it's great that we're making a good dent on the stuff in the house, it's driving me sightly mad already. Unlike most moves where you have a new property to gradually move all your boxes and furniture in to, we are having to wait until move day to try and cram all our worldly belongings into a van and a car and ship them to a new country. Whose smart idea was that?! Needless to say, the house is a state.



This is how the living room situation is looking. Nice, right? Cosy. Thankfully, the bags and boxes at the front of the pile in the photo were all shipped off to the charity shop and the dump so we've got a little more space to play with.

 

If you're moving and you're a charitable sod, I would 100% recommend doing a quick search for a donation station. We found this Age UK station just up the road from our house and it has made donating goods a million times easier. Before we found this, we were having to park at a shopping centre and fill up a trolley or two with our bags and boxes and then wheel everything through the shopping centre to get into their tiny charity shop or there was the other option of driving right across town to the other tiny charity shop which wasn't always taking donations as they had too much already. This place is amazing though, it's a huge building all dedicated to the charity, you can park right outside the door and it's really easy to get to. Perfect! Plus, we'd rather donate than just dump our unwanted items; just because we don't want them anymore doesn't mean that someone else couldn't benefit from them.

As well as donating to charity, we also thought we'd get rid of some games and DVDs. TJ had an old Xbox & I had a PS3 both with a bunch of games that we didn't play anymore. We decided that we wanted to trade up and save for a ps4 together. The best place we found for trading up was CEX.

     Well, this past week has been a tad manic. On Saturday evening I finished my last ever shift in work which was far more emotional that I had anticipated! I was greeted with flowers, a card & a mahoosive cookie and lots of hugs. I was fortunate to work with an amazing bunch of people and I will truly miss them.

 Firstly, Apologies for the radio silence between my first post and this one, TJ and I went on holiday the week after the last post and we've been super busy with work and the house since then. But I'm back! Today has been the first real motion towards prepping the house for the move and we're feeling pretty good about it so far. We started the morning off by going round the various rooms in the house and picking out items that we wouldn't need or want for the move to try and condense the volume of stuff for packing in the van.





TJ got out his fancy tape and placed a strip on the floor to map out what was going to the charity shop and what was heading to the dump. This made life so much easier as we could just plonk things on the floor and there was still a modicum of organisation.




This was the result of a brief skim through the kitchen cupboards. It's so difficult to make the judgement call on what can be tossed when you can't be 100% sure you won't need it again before you leave. We've tried to be as ruthless as possible even though it was only a small amount of things that we moved today.

So once the piles were sorted on the living room floor, we collected up the items headed for the dump and we went and disposed of them. After the dump we made our way to our local Tesco supermarket and pleaded with the very nice fruit & veg man* if we could take some boxes off his hands.


*Note: He himself was not actually made from fruit & veg (Just to clarify).



We were obviously in the right place at the right time because the nice man in Tesco's appeared with a big stack of boxes for us to take for free. This is definitely the thing to try if you need boxes. We see people in the likes of IKEA actually buying boxes for moving and they could save so much money!



The latter part of the day was spent packing up the charity shop items into the car then dropping them off and getting a celebratory cup of coffee. Last stop was to Home Bargains for home cleaning supplies. The house is a little run down but we're determined to leave it in the best possible condition and get most of our deposit back so we can put it towards our mortgage fund!