Keeping it festive

I appreciate that we're firmly in February 2016 but a friend asked me to write about this so I am. Please accept my apologies for dipping back into Christmas now.

Christmas inspires mixed feelings. There are those who love Christmas so go all out for it. And there are those who wish it away. For me Christmas can be a weird time and I think a lot of that stems from growing up with separated parents. I was about 4 or 5 when they split and it's had a pretty lasting effect on my life.

When it comes to Christmas, I've had the good, the bad, and the ugly. So for 2015 I wanted to make it especially good. Possibly even great. So the first thing I wanted to do before December began was establish what exactly that would involve. This was around the time I also began getting back into Pinterest, that devil of a website.

Given that Andy and me have been together for 3 years now I felt it was about time that we started setting down the traditions that we would carry forward every year. Traditions that would stick or change as we grow old together. For me that meant creating our own advent calendar of festive activities.

I'd like to say at this point, god bless Andy Vine. He puts up with my obsessing over ideas and notions with little complaint. He doesn't always get involved but he doesn't tell me to stop going on about things either.

I fretted over the right advent calendar. I fretted over the activities. I fretted over when we'd do the activities. I fretted about everything I could possibly fret about. But it got done. I bought an advent calendar that we could insert our own activities and of course chocolates into. One night before December began, we sat down and wrote them all down, placing them into the correct dates, and sneaking some spare chocolates as we went. It was lovely.

Now we didn't have activities planned for every day because we had other things going on. And there were days where I didn't get chance to get a photo of what we were actually doing. I took a photo of each activity I'd written down though.

28. get a dog

Of all the things on my ’30 before 30’ list, there are two which I thought were perhaps pushing it. Buying a car and getting a dog. Both of these are costly commitments. And as I would like to be on my way to being debt free by 2017 then these ideas could perhaps be a hindrance to that notion as well. 

In respect of buying a car, well I don’t even drive so I have no idea what I’m supposed to be looking for. I know what cars I like, and I do have very modest taste, but I don’t know anything else about cars. So I have to hugely rely on Andy to help with this idea, and probably my old man as he does know about cars.

However when it comes to dogs, dogs I do know. I was born and raised with dogs. We’ve had 4 dogs in our family in my life so far. One of which is still with us and living with my old man, a tubby brindle Staffordshire Bull Terrier called Kilo who is as daft as anything and resembles a barrel.

Although Andy hasn’t had quite the same experience as me, his family did get their first dog Molly when Andy began college and Andy did have a dog with his previous girlfriend as well. The lovely Molly, a Border Collie Alsatian cross, still lives with his parents and although she’s getting on, she still behaves like a giant puppy when it comes to playing.

Essentially what I’m saying is, we’re very firmly dog people. So when me and Andy starting dating and it started becoming serious, the idea of getting a dog together was always there. Talking about dogs has probably been a building block for our relationship. However our living arrangements haven’t suited bringing a dog into our lives. Until now.

At the end of last year the chats about getting a dog became more about planning and less about dreaming. My hours at work had changed and I had scope to change them again, we now live in a 2 bed house rather than a 2 room flat, we thought about our lifestyles and how a dog would fit into that. Ultimately we couldn’t really see any issues in terms of bringing a dog into our home and into our family.

It actually didn’t take long to find the puppy for us. She was waiting for us in the second litter we went to view. I think Andy fell in love first but I was mostly sold by the time we got home afterwards. So once I could call the local vets the following morning and arrange for first vaccination appointment, I was in. We confirmed right away and transferred our deposit. We were finally getting our own little puppy.

So without further ado, meet Maggie Rose.

Maggie is a Shih Tzu Poodle cross and at the time of writing this, she’s three months old. We got her on the 22nd December so she was that dream come true of a puppy for Christmas. Of course she’s ours for life really. When we first saw her she was 4 weeks old and we saw her again at 6 weeks before finally bringing her home at 8 weeks old. We saw her with her littermates, her mum, and her auntie. We are very much against puppy mill farming which is why it was important for us to ensure we weren’t endorsing this.

We would have loved to open our home to a rescue dog however Andy can be really sensitive to dogs due to his eczema. Rather than cause Andy to suffer or worse have to rehome a dog from a rescue centre, we decided to pick a breed which wouldn’t moult. Hopefully we’ll be able to welcome a rescue dog into our lives later down the line.

For now though we’re enjoying all the ups and downs of bringing up a puppy. She’s very food motivated, very playful, quite rowdy, and incredibly smart when she wants to be. I don’t think we could possibly be more in love with her than we already are.

Currently Maggie is curled up in her bed following a rather soggy walk early this morning. We plan on taking her on as many of our adventures as we can. She's our little best mate after all. Those following me on various social media outlets will already know that anything I post these days is Maggie related. It'll probably be much the same on my blog going forward. But who can resist that face?

14. develop all my films - rolls 2 & 3

Following on from my previous post about developing my films, these are rolls 2 & 3 from my initial selection. Can I just point out, in terms of storing the camera films I've shot on I literally keep them all together in a box. Nothing is labelled. It's a mixed up box of random camera films that I've shot on at some point with one of my various cameras. Admittedly a terrible system.

So when I was pulling out films to develop, the chances of pulling out two films from the same period and indeed same event is actually pretty slim. Yet somehow I did it. Of the initial 3 films I selected, all 3 of them were shot in 2013. Even weirder, 2 of them are from the same event. Spooky right?

Beginning of August 2013 Andy took me to Y Not festival. Compared to Glastonbury, Y Not is a pretty tiny festival. But pretty perfectly formed. It was an incredibly wet weekend. In fact heavy thunderstorms stopped several performances. Most notably for us Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip where Pip crowd surfed out of the tent and eventually wound up on Andy's head trying not to knock his glasses off. We kept getting evacuated back to our tents because thunderstorms and festival electricals do not mix. It was both terrifying and amazing. I remember it as being a really fun albeit soggy weekend. We should probably go again sometime.

I had forgotten how much I like photographing Andy using my film cameras. He's a very handsome man and he looks especially good on film. I'm sure there's something to be said for the best photographs being those where the photographer has a great love for the subject.